Travel Writer, Essayist, Adventurer, Teacher
By Rolf Potts Back in 1981, when I was ten years-old and in the fourth grade, I drew a poster that illustrated everything I loved and hated about the world. For some reason I’ve kept it after all these years, and not too long ago I hung it up in the mudroom of my house.…
Brendan Shanahan is a writer and painter, living in Australia. He has been a journalist, tour guide, and advertising creative. He is best known for the books In Turkey I Am Beautiful (2008), The Secret Life of the Gold Coast (2004), and Mr Snack and the Lady Water: Travel Tales From My Lost Years (2013).…
(author’s note, 2026) The following short story was published in the August/September 1998 issue of an online literary magazine called Eclectica. While fictional, the story is a roman à clef evocation of a certain time in my life, when I was coming to terms with the fact that the manuscript for my first travel book…
Back in 2005, when I moved into my prairie double-wide in rural Kansas, I bought a sturdy used desk at the local DAV Thrift Store for $35. Over the course of the next 20 years, I worked at that desk almost every day, when I wasn’t off traveling the world — and in fact I…
Angie Chuang is an author and educator based in Denver, Colorado. Her debut memoir, The Four Words for Home (Aquarius Press / Willow Books 2014), was based on her journalistic coverage of Afghan immigrants and travel to Afghanistan after 9/11. Her scholarly crossover book, American Otherness: News Media Representations of Identity and Belonging (Routledge 2025)…
1) Never explain something you can dramatize Master storytellers never explain. They do the hard, painfully creative thing — they dramatize. Audiences are rarely interested, and certainly never convinced, when forced to listen to the discussion of ideas. Dialogue, the natural talk of characters pursuing desire, is not a platform for the filmmaker’s philosophy. Explanations…
One interesting footnote to the journey Kiki and I made through Switzerland and Austria a few months ago was that we accidentally traversed the micro-nation of Liechtenstein as our train made its way from Chur to Innsbruck. Liechtenstein didn’t announce its borders (nor were its flags flying in any of the communities we passed through),…
Longtime New York Times contributor Perry Garfinkel has also written for National Geographic Magazine, The Travel Channel, Travel & Leisure, and AARP the Magazine, among many others. A former reporter and editor for newspapers and magazines, he helped launch New Age Journal and EcoTraveler Magazine (both defunct). He has written four books (including national bestseller…
Amid our Vienna sojourn a few months ago, Kiki and I saw all manner of kitschy Mozart and Freud and Klimt socks for sale — and at the Leopold Museum Kiki splurged on a pair of socks depicting Egon Schiele’s 1910 “Self-Portrait with Striped Shirt.” I have a weakness for these socks myself. While visiting…
1) Solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity Solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity. Alone one’s thoughts wander freely over space. In the presence of others they are pulled back by an awareness of other personalities who project their own worlds onto the same area. 2) Place is…
Caroline Van Hemert is an Alaska-based writer and wildlife biologist. She’s the author of The Sun is a Compass, winner of the Banff Mountain Book Award. Her essays and articles explore the intersections between science and adventure travel, and have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Outside, Vogue, High Country News, and…
This week I appeared on Yonder Radio, an hour-long audio show and podcast produced by the Center for Rural Strategies, to talk about my feature-length found-footage video essay Kansas Never Plays Itself, which draws on a century of film to analyze how cinematic shorthand shapes the public’s imagination of places. What’s the name of this…
I’ve noted here before that I’m regularly interviewed by traditional news outlets seeking my perspective, as a veteran travel writer, about various aspects of travel and tourism. Sometimes my quotes don’t make it into those articles. One of the more interesting such articles in recent years was Laura Gottesdiener’s Reuter’s article, “For migrants, the Darien…
1) Capturing an experience while you are having it alters the way you experience it Capturing an experience while you are having it alters the way you experience it, as Wendell Berry’s poem “The Vacation” describes. It tells the story of a man who films his entire vacation with an older technology, the video camera.…
An EMMY-nominated producer, on-camera host, camera operator, writer, and award-winning photographer, Rachel Rudwall has traveled all seven continents, lived in three countries, and journeyed through 80+ nations – all in the name of storytelling. Her global audience spans over 250,000 adventurous souls, and clients include Google, TIME, Nat Geo, AFAR, Discovery, TEDx, and more. How…
1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an…
1) Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts, like envy and jealousy, often used interchangeably, but distinct at their cores. The fundamental difference between them is that a confession, in the word’s historical, nonliterary sense, is addressed to some entity—God, the court, the public, a person one has wronged. That…
Erin Levi is a Connecticut-born, Montréal-based travel journalist whose work spans the Himalayas, Central Asia, and beyond. A polyglot and lifelong traveler, she has trekked to Sir Edmund Hillary’s favorite viewpoint of Mount Everest, sipped Chasselas and danced on tables with the Cent-Suisses, a historic Swiss Guard unit, during a once-in-a-generation Swiss winegrowers’ festival in…
My Deviate podcast has been, since its inception, a pretext to explore topics I don’t typically cover as a travel writer. Granted, a majority of my episodes have nonetheless been about travel (or travel writing), but by its very name, Deviate gives me the opportunity to veer away from what I’m supposed to write about as…
Here’s a curious look into AI image enhancement technology, in relation to how we once captured images. It’s a story that dates back more than 37 years. In early 1989, not long after Kansas native Barry Sanders won the Heisman Trophy as the top player in college football, I had the chance to pose with…
Jen Rose Smith is an award-winning writer and editor living in Vermont’s Green Mountains, where she writes deeply reported features on travel, culture, sustainability, adventure, and place. Her work has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Geographic, BBC Travel, and many other outlets. Recent stories include a feature for the…
1) On the way Americans call football “football” for no cogent reason Americans call football “football” because that’s what Americans want to call it. We offer no cogent clarification as to why this is, nor do we insist that other nations do the same, nor do we spend much time considering how this might seem…
I learned many things helping Kiki make her short film, The Game Camera, and I’ll share two of the more curious lessons here. First, I learned that the writer’s job is pretty much to keep out of everyone’s way once the production begins. I have almost no photos of myself on-set, and the image here…
Natalie Compton is a travel reporter for the Washington Post. Originally from California, she has covered travel, food, and alcohol from every continent. How did you get started traveling? My dad did a lot of domestic travel for work (very George Clooney in Up in the Air) and my mom was always happy to tag…
Earlier this year, around mid-October, RolfPotts.com went offline for a few days, due to a DNS glitch that happened as my webmaster was moving the site’s content to a bigger server. It was a weirdly unsettling experience, for reasons I’ll try to explain here. On having had a personal website for nearly three decades RolfPotts.com…
A full transcript of Rolf's 2025 video essay about the role places play in cinema.
One of the pleasures of writing books that eventually prove popular with readers is hearing which quotes and outtakes from a book resonate with people. A little more than three years after the release of The Vagabond’s Way, here are nine quotes from the book that readers seem to enjoy quoting back to me (both…
Mark Orwoll is the author of four books, including Just One Little Hitch (Pleasant Villain Press, 2024), a travel memoir. For 30 years he was on the editorial staff of Travel + Leisure magazine, most recently as the International Editor. He has won numerous accolades over the years, including the Silver Award in the 2025 Lowell Thomas competition’s Travel Journalist…
The following Q&A about the writing life was conducted for a class project by a writing student named Josh Hammingh, who attended my undergrad alma mater in Oregon. What degree(s) do you have, and what was your major? I got a Bachelor of Arts in Writing/Literature from George Fox in 1993. Much later, after I’d…
This month marks the 25th anniversary of my travel writer interview series at RolfPotts.com. Indeed, I’ve been interviewing one travel writer a month since November 2000, which means I’ve now featured upwards 300 travel writers, from A-list icons like Simon Winchester and Pico Iyer and Pam Houston, to up-and-coming travel bloggers and new-media creators. This…
I: Pilgrims in a Sliding World For almost as long as I’ve been making my living as a writer, I’ve been telling folks about the role that failure has played in my development as an author. Specifically, my failure to write an insightful and coherent book about my first vagabonding experience – an eight-month van…
I’ve said before that one of the reasons I named my podcast Deviate (as opposed to, say, Vagabonding) was that I wanted the creative freedom to veer away from the travel issues I’ve covered as a journalist for the past 25+ years, and explore other intellectual themes. Since my interest in cinema and screenwriting is…
1) On the edifying mission of pre-tourism travel Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment. 2) On the aesthetic compromises of modern travel I don’t want to sound too gloomy, but there’s…
Rebecca Hall is a British travel writer who divides her time between the UK and Greece, a country she has called home since 2008 and the main focus of her work. Specializing in Greek culture, history and luxury, she brings the country’s rich traditions and landscapes to life for international audiences. Her features have appeared…
Between 2013 and 2019 I conducted occasional interviews with my mother, Alice Potts, about various aspects of her life. I did this out of the conviction that once the people you love are gone, you won’t have the chance to ask them the kind of simple questions about their lives that you can (but often…
When my mother, Alice Potts, died last month, part of the process of working through my grief came in digging into the archive of digital files I have collected over the years to document her life. This ritual was in part an endeavor to eulogize her in a way that honored who she was, but…
My mother, Alice Potts, died peacefully last month in her memory-care assisted-living apartment in Salina, Kansas. She was 81 years old, and had in recent years been dealing with dementia (which was compounded of late by cerebral hemorrhages). Mom grew up the oldest of six on a farm near the town of Aliceville in eastern…
1) On the way trails have made us what we are Trails can be found in virtually every part of this vast, strange, mercurial, partly tamed, but still shockingly wild world of ours. Throughout the history of life on Earth, we have created pathways to guide our journeys, transmit messages, refine chaos, and preserve wisdom.…
1) The better the villain, the better the hero The better the villain, the better the hero. The better the villain, the better the plot, because the villain is the one who’s usually driving the plot. I was very, very, very lucky to inherit [Hannibal Lecter]. I could not invent him to save my life.…
Jen Murphy is an award-winning journalist who splits her time between Boulder and Maui. She started her career at Food & Wine magazine, then worked on staff at AFAR and Sunset. As a freelancer, she’s carved out a niche around her love of health, fitness, and adventure sports. She regularly contributes to Conde Nast Traveler,…
1) If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion — it’s probably one of the innumerable clichés which have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that it takes a special effort not…
1) On the ubiquity of beauty Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. 2) On the uses of simplicity It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if…
1) Genre stories help us escape the narratives of our humdrum lives Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate. It’s plot we want and plenty of it. Heroes should go up against villains (sympathetic or hateful); love should, if possible, win…
Having reported from 120 countries on 7 continents, Robin’s stories and photography have appeared in over a dozen major publications including The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Melbourne Age and National Geographic. A former columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail, MSN, and Vancouver Sun, Robin is the creator and co-host of Word Travels, a 40-part…
1) On authenticity Now suppose some loon comes up and says: “Have you found the real Asia?” It is all real as far as I can see. Though certainly a lot of it has been corrupted by the West. Neither Victorian Darjeeling nor the Kennedy-era Oberoi can be called ideal Asia. I remember Deki Lhalungpa…
My father, George Potts, taught science at Fremont High in south-central Los Angeles from 1964-1967. In the popular imagination this corner of urban America is associated with the 1965 Watts Riots, but I grew up knowing, despite media/historical stereotypes, that the young people of this community helped my father (who at the time wasn’t sure…
I’ve featured author and digital-culture pioneer Kevin Kelly in a number of podcast episodes over the years — in large part because he is so insightful on topics like travel, technology, and life in general. The opportunity to participate in one of Kevin’s “Walk and Talk” sojourns in Thailand was a big highlight for me…
Trained as an anthropologist with a degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Michael Engelhard worked for twenty-five years as a wilderness guide and outdoor instructor in Alaska and on the Colorado Plateau. Recent books include the National Outdoor Book Award-winning memoir Arctic Traverse as well as What the River Knows: Essays from the Heart of Alaska, and the Grand Canyon essay…
Though I’ve never aspired to be a visual artist — or even studied art history in a formal way — I’ve always been enchanted, as a traveler, by modern art museums. I recall being so fascinated by what I saw at the 1997 Gwangju Biennale in Korea that, more than one decade later, I bought…
Kiki and I visited the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Strasbourg in Alsace, France, the same week I watched Orson Welles’s quirky 1973 essay-film F for Fake, where, in the context of another French cathedral, Welles noted: This has been standing here for centuries. But, it is without signature. …It might be just this one anonymous glory, of all…