Travel Review Online

A review of Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing, edited by Gillian Kendall. University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

I was at travel writing conference not in extent ago, and the cocktail conversation eventually (and inevitably) turned to the question of what made a good nonfiction narrative.  Opinions abounded, but one guy – who happened to have existence an editor at a major gazette’s travel section – said that travel narratives fail when they’re overly focused on the writer. What he wanted, he said, was to walk away from a story knowing more about the destination than the person who wrote it.

I, along with the assembled, sagely nodded.  But I’ve been turning it throughout in my head ever ago, and I’d like to amend my bow: while travel writers, as a class, can be an amazingly dull bunch, there are plenty of writers who are at least while interesting as a destination, sometimes more so. Travel writing exists somewhere in the magnetic straining between brace poles: that of place and that of the character who is traveling. There’s no undivided point of finished balance; it shifts on a case-by-case basis.

In the pantheon of great travel writing, there are pieces where the writer as a character is hard to detect, concealed partially or entirely in the cloak of objectivity. Travel writing itself began in this way, being of the class who an essential measure of transmitting basic information about terra incognita – for instance, see Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus. Or Mark Twain. I’ve recently been re-reading Twain’s excursion writing, and while it certainly holds up, he obviously expects his story to be an introduction to the destination he’s visiting, spending many perfect sentences describing the methodical degree of the white that is the houses in Bermuda, for instance.

Twain was publishing in the 1860s and 70s, and in the following decades, other thing of the world became known, and traveled, and written about, and the task of a travel writer changed. By the early 20th century, readers needed not with equal reason much basic information — guidebooks had emerged to handle that task anyway –and more in the way of something deeper, more personal. (By then, as now, even if a reader hadn’t been to Bermuda, they’d become familiar enough with the concept of a subtropical island to disqualify description as depth.)

So, in 1905, at what time Edith Wharton published her travel book, Italian Backgrounds, she summarized the situation perfectly: “Italy is a foreground and a background. The foreground is the possessions of the guidebook…the background that of the lounger, the dreamer, the serious student of Italy,” which is to say, herself. But not only herself, Wharton implies: the foreground and the background work together. The place illuminates the person, the personal story illuminates the place.*

The personal story takes antecedence in many contemporary anthologies of travel writing, whether they’re focus upon the work of amanuensis, or a particular type of writer. Among these, there’s a new offering Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing, edited by Perceptive Travel contributor Gillian Kendall.

The punning title implies that the stories in this book could be slap-your-palm-on-the-customs-counter strident — in contrast, a book of gay male travel writing from the same publisher is entitled Wonderlands – but the very fine stories gathered here are not argumentative. Something to Declare is an engaging pile of profoundly felt, unapologetically personal pieces. These tales are searches for ardor, for answers and toward intent in the mostly intimate of relationships that happen to take place in a setting that is elsewhere.

There are a number of stories here that achieve that magical balancing act between person and place, at what place the place illuminates the personal and vice versa. Among these, “Hot Springs, Montana”, by Lori Soderlind, which deftly paints a picture of a not-often visited part of the United States, while exploring the ideas we have about the sort of people that live there, and what she hoped to gain by dint of. hanging out with them. “Oaxaca”, by Suzanne Parker, tells the story of a stored go trip through her current lover to the city she’d visited by a prior one; “Wind”,  by Tzivia Gover, which is a close observation of a closeted Japanese lesbian couple.

As well, there are  pieces in the anthology that tilt so far towards the personal that I’m not sure they can be properly characterized as travel writing. For instance, “What Happens After This Day”, by Hannah Tennant-Moore, is the engrossing story of an intense love transaction, woven in with a finely drawn narrative of a time spent at a Buddhist monastery in India — but the point of the story isn’t really the monastery, it’s the love affair. In “You Can Take Me to the Shrine, But You Can’t Make Me Pray”, in that place’s vivid description of Mexico City and its Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, but the story is really about a woman struggling with the idea of compromise and making a lifetime commitment to a partner and it may be to motherhood. In “Shopping”, by Laura Sanders, the setting is dressing rooms in Italy, but the subject is –well, clothes shopping — and a woman’s sexuality. These are all excellent personal essays – and yes, they interweave travel — moreover the place itself is a mere backdrop for the special drama, not an indispensable element part of the story. These stories could easily exist set in other places out of doing any damage to the overall meaning.

In fairness, we’re prepared for the certainty that definitions will be fuzzy. In her preface, Kendall questions every word in the book’s subtitle except “good”, She writes that she had a clear idea of the definition of “lesbian”, before she started attached the project, but as she sorted through submissions, inability to doubt wavered. What makes a lesbian a lesbian? She received stories with no reference to sexuality or orientation, submissions from a transgendered woman who was born male, from a lesbian in a heterosexual relationship. “As editor, did I need to be…policing the definition of “women” as well as “lesbian”? She adjusted the effect by skirting it: “I decided that my responsibility was not to create exclusive definitions, but just find stories through heart.”

Who could blame her because of that? The result is that many of the writers in this collection do not make their sexual orientation a particular issue in one opportunity to pass or any other; it’s a unblended fact about their lives that informs their outlook and their stories. As well, while the stories in the collection do not shy absent from sex, but nor single in kind nor the other is sex inserted gratuitously. And that’s all for the better, I think.

Kendall also questions the genre of literary production that she’s curating: “What [is] “travel inscription” anyway? Must it be about some exotic destination, a foreign tillage, or could these stories have existence about a return to closely after a long time away?” Again, she punts: “[I] quit trying to determine how far unit had to go to “travel”, and settled instead on choosing the stories that let me know the relater’s heart.” This explains why there are many fine stories in Something to Declare where place is inferior integral than it ought to be in a book of take a trip writing.

There’s one other essential criteria instead of this anthology that’s left fuzzy, and it’s the one that troubles me the most: the note betwixt fiction and nonfiction. In the introduction, we learn that there’sitting single work of simple falsehood in the book — I assume it’s the piece labeled “story”. But there are two other pieces in the anthology where we’re privy to the central character’s thoughts, and the central character’s name is manifold than the writer’s, and so it’s unclear what the writer’s intent is towards the conformity to fact – could it be a deft piece of reportage? A partial fiction? Or is this the work of a transgendered writer, a memoir in the persona of her former gender? This speculation is a disorienting, and in the end a lunacy from an anthology that otherwise offers so much to admire.

*My source on the history of travel writing is the essential Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing.

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