It’s never too late to write about that amazing trip

Afraid you’ve waited too long to write up that amazing trip you once took? Consider the writer whose work appeared in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 8 (2012). Her essay focused on a trip to London she took in 1969. It was the writer’s first published story; she’d been sitting with it for 43 years.

I learned of this example of a “slow burn” in my interviews with the anthology’s editor, Lavinia Spalding, but many of us can relate to delays of years or even decades in figuring out how best to tell a particular story.

In a recent article, Everything Has Changed, but Craft Still Matters, I write about how travel isn’t exempt from our current moment of political and cultural reckoning, and showcase the lessons that Spalding has learned about craft after editing six editions of the anthology.

The whole idea of slow burns comes to me courtesy of poet and essayist Jaswinder Bolina. I took a webinar with him recently through Creative Nonfiction, and he laid down the differences between hot takes — pieces written quickly, in response to something in the news — and slow burns, which may grapple with the same issues, but are deeper in the thinking and slower in the writing.

Spalding favors the slow burn, too. To my leading question, “Is being under lockdown a good time to work on travel writing that grapples with the significance of past trips—and of travel in general?” Spalding answered with a resounding Yes!, adding that “this is the perfect time to dust off old travel journals and photo albums and write the experience you’ve been sitting with.”

I was recently interviewed about travel writing, and a member of the audience asked, “I took a trip a year ago. Is it too late to write about it?” I answered that it’s only too late if you want to write a “What’s new in X” piece. If you want to grapple with deeper themes, it’s never too late.

It’s not only travel essays that benefit from taking your time. Bolina told the story of his own attempted “hot take” just after 9/11. He wanted to write an op-ed from the point of view of an American who looked a lot like the people who’d flown the planes into the Twin Towers. He knew he resembled the photos of the hijackers, “the Indian conflated with the Pakistani, the Pakistani mistaken for the Afghani, the Afghani called an Arab, the Arab undistinguished from the Persian and the Turk, the Shia and the Sunni and the Sikh all taken for one bearded and turbaned body.” That’s from his essay, “Empathy for the Devil,” in his new book of essays, Of Color. He never published a hot take on the subject, but the essay that began as a quick response to 9/11 became, almost 20 years later, a slow vivid burn of a rumination, a deeper and slower and ultimately more interesting version of that initial hot take.

It can take years for an idea or experience to marinate in your heart and mind, and sometimes you can only write about something once it’s long gone. Jamil Jan Kochai, who recently published “Letter from Logar” in Off Assignment, said in an interview, “I find it almost impossible now to write a place until I leave it behind.” For him that includes Afghanistan, Sacramento, and Iowa.

I feel the same, but I have a different roster of places. I’m finishing a novel set in Costa Rica, where I once lived. And recently I unearthed a folder of carbon copies of letters I wrote to friends and family when I lived in Quito, Ecuador, in the mid 1980s. Remember when people used to write letters — long, leisurely letters? Rereading those letters brings my two years in Quito rushing back: the midnight blue Vespa 90 that took us all over the high Andean city; dropping acid and hiking to the base of Cotopaxi volcano in canvas tennis shoes; teaching Jane Fonda aerobics to the city’s one percent, who went on shopping sprees in Miami; how much the bus ride from Quito to Baños cost; how Quiteños celebrate the new year by throwing buckets of water on unsuspecting passersby; and the time we were at a play and the cast stopped the performance to denounce the latest US imperialist invasion — of a small island called Granada, which I had to look up on a map.

I’m sifting through the details, trying to find the essence. Why did I take off after college and live for two years in South America? I visited again in 2017 — how has Ecuador changed in the last 35 years? How has the very idea of travel and living abroad changed?

If I ever figure out what I want to communicate about those two years in Ecuador, it will be the slowest of slow-burn essays. Instead of lamenting my long-term smoldering, though, I’m trying to take Bolina’s example to heart, and see the delay as an opportunity to go deeper.

What stories have you abandoned because you think they’re too old? What might you be able to bring to those stories now, years or even decades later, that you couldn’t have brought to the table at the time?

The photo is of me and my then-boyfriend, in a Quito park in the 1980s. We didn’t usually dress like that — I can’t remember what was going on or where I got that hat. I do know he’s reading his mother’s bible (the daughter of a minister, she converted to Judaism when she married), and I’m reading The Yage Letters by Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs.