“I’m interested in writing because I don’t want to sleepwalk through life. I feel like we have an appallingly brief time on earth, and we’re here to see and understand and do as much good as we can before we’re gone.” –Anthony Doerr
In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Anthony talk about how the pace of travel changes the experience of travel, and what it’s like to travel as a writer (2:45); how to manage the local and the global, the specific and the universal, the concrete and the speculative, in one’s writing (12:30); how the idea of “home” influences one’s craft as a writer who travels (23:00); common mistakes writers make when writing about places and cultures they don’t know well, and humiliating travel (and book-tour) experiences (31:00).
Anthony Doerr is a novelist and essayist, and short story writer. His 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was made into a Netflix miniseries in 2023.
Books and authors mentioned:
Other links:
The Deviate theme music comes from the title track of Cedar Van Tassel’s 2017 album Lumber.
Note: We don’t host a “comments” section, but we’re happy to hear your questions and insights via email, at [email protected].
“Sometimes it’s good to sit still and let a place move through you instead of you moving through a place.” –Rolf Potts In this...
“In COVID times it’s harder to get on a plane and go hiking in, say, Austria or Italy. So we said, ‘why not do...
“Travel is one of the few activities we engage in not knowing the outcome and reveling in that uncertainty. Nothing is more forgettable than...