Stayton Bonner

How did you become a travel writer?

I don’t look at travel writing as being much different from any other kind of writing. I’ve done a little bit of everything, some political stories and more character-driven stuff. I tend to approach travel writing pretty much the same way that I do any other kind of story. I really try to find a narrative instead of just describing a bunch of hollowed trees or plates of pasta.

There are great travel pieces by writers whom I admire a lot. Joan Didion wrote brilliantly about Newport, Rhode Island. That’s not exactly a travel piece but it’s a piece with a sense of place. John McPhee. Ian Frazier is a writer I admire who’s done some stuff that maybe counts as travel writing. David Foster Wallace did brilliant travel essays. I suppose his boat piece or fair piece fit into the travel story. George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London reads like a travel book to me.

 Where do you get your ideas for trips? 

The Venice trip came from a magazine ad. Generally, I try to find my way into places that most people would not ordinarily seek out. Greenland was an interesting notion for a story (see Meltdown from the April 2008 issue.) It just seemed like the kind of place that would leave an indelible mark on the consciousness whereas maybe shopping in Paris would not. Generally I try to go somewhere that leads to awkward experiences.

My Dad and I began taking a trip every year together after he beat cancer. My brother and I hadn’t done a whole lot of travel together. I’ve sort of written about our squabbles enough that it’s become a little tiresome. We were literally going through the fact-checking on a piece I’d written for GQ about our relationship when he called up and said, “I talked with the guy and that’s cool you’ve written about our childhood but it’s getting a little wearying.” I said, “That’s totally cool. I’m not going to do it anymore.” And right when I was on the phone with him, I got an email from Outside asking if my brother might want to go to Italy with me. I called my brother back and said, “Hey man, I know we just had this conversation and I’m certainly not trying to push this one way or the other but, you know, if you want to then there’s a free trip to Venice in it for you.”

He said, “Cool, great.”

I said, “You know it’s going to be us doing that same thing where I write about us bitching at each other, right?”

He said, “That’s totally cool, man. No sweat.”

It was funny with the Vogalonga story. At the outset, we were legitimately anxious that we’d get along so well there wouldn’t be a story. But, uh, that ended up not being the case at all. We were at each other’s throats in a genuine sort of way. 

The Vogalonga story (see Vogalooooonga from the April 2010 issue) discusses an ongoing feud, sometimes physical, between you and your brother Dan. If you were a WWE wrestler, what would be your nickname and why?

Oh God. Um, I don’t know. Probably “the Sweater”. It seems that when I travel with my brother, I’m the guy worrying about the details while my brother is telling me to chill out and get over it. I think my super power would be logistic anxiety.

What’s in your emergency travel kit? 

I don’t think I have one. I just got back from Amsterdam last night. I had to go through the whole rigamarole with the bag because I’d left a tube of toothpaste in there. I still haven’t gone to the trouble of getting travel-sized toiletry containers. I’m such a desperately disorganized traveler that there is no kit. But let’s see... Usually, I like to bring a pair of tweezers and some dental floss. That might be it.

In the July 2007 issue, you wrote about how to extract a tick from your genitals. Was this rooted in personal experience from your youth in North Carolina? Why is whiskey a better anti-adhesive than, say, tequila? 

It’s a drag when that happens. It’s unfortunately common in my neck of the woods in North Carolina.

The whiskey is a southern thing. Generally, you have a bottle of Wild Turkey lying around. Giving the tick some reasonably good brown liquor before you set it on fire just seems like the decent thing to do.

You biked along the Mississippi River levee in the March 2007 issue, tubed Florida’s Wekiva River in the April 2009 issue, and kayaked Venice in the current issue. Why water sports?

I don’t know. The Mississippi thing was a holdover from my time in New Orleans. At the end of each workday, I’d take my bike to the levee and ride for an hour or two just because it was a congenial thing to do. It was also the only way you could get a look at the Mississippi. The river was all around you but you could never see beyond the levee.

You’re right. There has been a fair amount of water stuff. There was water action in Greenland too. I guess it’s maybe because doing anything on the water seems like it will be easy. A kayak trip just sounds easy. You don’t have to go up any hills or anything like that. You can put all your stuff in the boat. It seems like sort of a cheat to get some outdoorsy cred. I’d done a couple boating trips where you just put in at the top of a river and cruise for a day or two. I thought the Vogalonga was going to be like that. Really simple. A leisurely cruise around some islands. But man, we didn’t train for it or anything. I guess I’d been going to the gym a fair amount and thought my upper body was in reasonable shape but good God, I’ve never had upper body fatigue like I did at the end of that thing. Every time I pulled the paddle I would literally whimper like a frightened kitten. It was a bad scene. That head wind was just absolutely outrageous. It was a crusher. If I hadn’t felt it would be a terrible humiliation to turn around—if I hadn’t been writing a piece about it—I’m sure I would have bailed. Paddling for hours straight into a headwind is a pretty easy route to despair.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers? 

Don’t be afraid to destroy your work. Don’t get too attached to the early drafts. Don’t treasure a sentence or description just because it took you 45 minutes to write it. Go back, be cruel, and revise it.

Wells Tower’s short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burnedwas recently released in paperback. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Brooklyn, New York.

We've been living in Santa Fe for three weeks now. Here's a picture of our Great Dane Rufus checking out the snow outside our home. My work at Outside Magazine mostly consists of fact-checking. In his 2009 New Yorker article Checkpoints, John McPhee details the duties of a fact-checker. Most of your work is on the phone, learning the mathematics of international time zones. It's interesting stuff.

Former New Yorker and current New York Times Magazine head honcho fact-checker Sarah Harrison Smith lays it all out in The Fact Checker's Bible. I've got to admit this was not a book I'd envisioned myself curling up with next to a fire. But it's interesting stuff. Smith delineates how the U.S. press is privileged with a Constitutional Right to free press, as opposed to most other countries. But with that privilege comes responsibility to ensure periodicals get it right. For one thing, it lessens the reputation of a magazine to print retractions for errors-in-print. Who's going to believe you if you keep getting it wrong? For another thing, you don't want to publish misinformation about someone—particularly if it involves sexual or legal indiscretions—without having done your homework. In the legal world, that's called libel. And it's not something with which the magazine wants to deal.

Wells Tower has a new article on Venice in Outside's April 2010 issue. I've been reading his short story collection, (just out in paperback,) Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. It's deserving of the praise. His writing reminds me of Tom Franklin's 2000 story collection Poachers. These guys are visceral and darkly funny.

Speaking of which, Catherine and I spent a couple hours last night in the dark confines of the Santa Fe Brewery listening to my old friend and Lost Highways recording artist Hayes Carll. He played a great set to a packed house. He was my last interview for the college newspaper, eight years ago. I caught him as Billy Joe Shaver's opening act at Austin's Cactus Cafe. Which I hear is now being closed in UT's budget cuts. Couldn't they borrow some money from Mack Brown to keep this musical institution going? Go to Save the Cactus Cafe and let your voice be heard.