A new essay of mine is up today in The Places Review. It’s about taking my kids to Disney World for the very first time, and about all the class anxieties that surfaced during the trip – among other things. It’s probably my favorite thing I’ve written this year. It follows a piece I published with them last month about a summer trip to Colombia with my family.
The Places Review is a new Substack publication edited by author and chef Eddie Huang, someone whose work and unique flavor I’ve long admired from afar, and who has been dope to collaborate with and learn from.
Both of these essays mark my first attempts at travel writing. For most of my career, I assumed travel essays were only about exotic locales, luxury hotels, and fine dining — or, the kinds of trips that never really resembled my life, and especially not now with two toddlers. But when I first connected with Eddie, I realized what he wanted was closer to what I’m already drawn to: stories about family, memory, and how travel shapes the way we see ourselves.
The Colombia essay came together a couple of months after I’d actually made the trip. Since I hadn’t planned to write about it, the piece was stitched together from memory, photos, and conversations with my wife to make sure I was capturing things accurately.
The Disney essay, by contrast, was written in real time. I drove up to Orlando with the intention of writing about the experience and carried a notebook along with a recorder, often dictating voice notes as I pushed a stroller through the park and stealing quiet moments to download my thoughts.
The two processes couldn’t have been more different, but each forced me to slow down and ask what truly belonged in the story. Travel writing can easily fall into a rote “we did this, then this, then this” rhythm. I learned along the way that what makes it more engaging is to move from summary to meaning — deciding not just what happened, but what it all adds up to.
Working with Eddie helped sharpen that focus tremendously.
On the Colombia piece, his editorial notes were delivered in a short email that pushed me to clarify what changed in my relationship to Colombia on this past trip. On the Disney one, we traded voice notes, which pushed me to discover the essay wasn’t just about taking my kids to Disney for the first time and spending a ton of money — it was also about the contrast between that experience and my own first trip there as a child with my single mother, when our circumstances looked very different than what my current circumstances are. Pulling that thread forward changed the piece entirely, giving it weight beyond a family trip recap.
In that sense, writing these essays felt a lot like working on a novel: I drafted them quickly, then spent most of my energy cutting away and refining until the story’s core revealed itself.
I gotta say the genre itself has surprised me with how much I enjoy it. I’m especially proud of approaching it through the lens of a father traveling with his family — capturing not just the magical moments but the chaos and exhaustion that come with toddlers in tow. That perspective isn’t one that is often encountered in travel writing, but it feels important, since most of my own journeys these days revolve around my kids.
Also, there is something intellectually stimulating about traveling with the intention of writing about the experience. It makes you more attuned to the world. It forces you to notice the stray detail, the overheard snippet, the fleeting expression on your child’s face, your passing thoughts. These small observations, stitched together, can transform a trip into a story worth telling.
In the end, these essays remind me why I love trying my hand at new forms. I’ve been writing professionally since I was sixteen – almost twenty years now — and in that time I’ve written hard news reports, investigative features, essays, fiction, photography criticism, education journalism, and screen writing. Adding travel writing to that list has been both a challenge and a joy. Each new genre I tackle forces me to stretch, to figure out how my voice fits into its conventions, and discover what I can do with it.
I hope to keep exploring this lane in the future. In the meantime, I’d love for you to check out my two pieces in The Places Review, alongside some excellent work they’ve previously published by Sean Thor Conroe, Harold, Eddie, and Junot Díaz.
Peace,
Andrew
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