Megan Harlan is an American travel writer, essayist, and fiction writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and Brittany, France. She is the author most recently of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (University of Georgia Press), winner of both the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction and the Independent Book Publishers Gold Medal in Creative Nonfiction. Her writing on place has appeared in The New York Times, Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, The Cincinnati Review, The Smart Set, Arts & Letters, and AGNI, among other literary journals and publications, and has been cited as distinguished several times in Best American Essays. Her newsletter, The France House, explores making a second home and a (more) creative life.
How did you get started traveling?
I grew up moving around the world, calling four continents home and traveling to two dozen countries by the time I graduated from high school. My family is American and I was born in Vermont, but thanks to my father’s job with an international engineering firm, we moved to places like London, Alaska, Saudi Arabia, Texas, and Colombia, globe-trotting all the while before finally settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. I continued this scale of travel after graduate school in New York City, where I took full advantage of JFK’s international terminal (and cheap flights) as a backpacker and later as a freelance travel writer. Travel is in my bones, since my parents taught me early how to be “a good traveler,” among the highest compliments in my family: Pack light, be a thoughtful guest on other people’s home turfs, pay attention, understand how lucky you are to see more of the world, and above all enjoy the journey itself.
How did you get started writing?
I’ve written for literally as long as I can remember: as soon as I could read, I made “books” out of stapled-together construction paper in which I scrawled little stories. But I got serious during college, when I took multiple writing workshops in fiction, poetry, and even playwriting that opened up writing to me as an art and a craft—and it’s been at the center of my life ever since. I’ve always worked across genres: At New York University’s writing MFA program, for example, I was admitted as a poet but graduated with a thesis in fiction. And soon after that I dove into writing nonfiction as a profession.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
For pay, it was my first published pieces for the legendary downtown New York arts and culture magazine, PAPER. I wrote book reviews, author interviews, and later restaurant reviews, pieces for which I was paid strange and tiny amounts, like $25.42 or $57.97, according to some mysterious word rate I could never figure out. But they were ultimately worth far more, as I parlayed those clips into regular gigs at several glossy magazines and as a freelance book critic for The New York Times Book Review.
All of this lead to my first “break” as a travel writer: I pitched an editor at The New York Times Travel desk on a feature about Tunisia’s Sahara Desert, which she agreed to consider “on spec.” In other words, I had to finance all the travel myself and write the article without promise of publication or compensation. Off I flew to Tunis on my own dime, on an off-season flight that cost the equivalent of a cross-country US ticket—a fact I found incredible. When the piece finally ran in a front-page spread many months later, it was one of the most exciting Sunday mornings of my life.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
Since becoming a mother, it’s been having my family in tow. My very favorite part of travel used to involve unplanned discoveries and maintaining the loosest possible itinerary. Being “the parent” on the road obviously runs counter to this, requiring a lot more responsibility and lot less freedom. But I’ve also loved sharing the experience of travel with my son, introducing other parts of the world to him and passing along the “good traveler” values my parents instilled in me. All of this has transformed my writing in so many ways, as I now write about travel in longer-form memoir—pieces that often range across different places and eras throughout my life. So while travel these days can feel more rushed and planned-out than ever, my creative process has slowed down and strengthened. Essentially, I give myself the time and space while writing that I lack on the road.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Always involving these questions: How much research should I do beforehand? Is it better to experience a location or journey with fresh eyes, or will a place be lost on you if you don’t have enough of a clue what’s going on there? I’ve vacillated between both stances, though I tend to write more creatively with more research going in. For my essay on Stonehenge, for example, I researched for ages and ages before visiting it, because I wanted to understand it as much as I could (no small task), and also to see what had already said about the place—so I’d know if I was having a new take, or at least a new way to frame it. When I finally visited the stones, I could relax and more fully take in the site.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
When I started out in the 1990s, the writing “business” was an entirely different landscape: even freelance writers on the travel and culture beats could support themselves, as I did, wholly by writing for magazines and newspapers with large circulations. Today, finding multiple sources of income is a requirement for most writers (see below). But I’m also very drawn to the opportunities offered by independent travel websites and newsletters, and have launched my own, The France House. It follows my recent experiences living part-time in a country I’ve always adored—and I’m excited to see where it goes.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Absolutely. Marketing writing, copy-writing and editing, and teaching (writing workshops today, as an ELL teacher in the past). Teaching is my favorite of these other income streams.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Growing up, I was steeped in books by classic European travel writers that profoundly shaped my sense of the genre—including Jan Morris, Bruce Chatwin, Wilfred Thesiger, Isabelle Eberhardt, Beryl Markham, and Freya Stark. But my peripatetic childhood also gave me the very clear sense that the world has many centers, and I was especially fascinated by early travel narratives by non-Western writers, including by Ibn Battuta and Basho. Far more recent travel books that I’ve loved weave place writing with personal memoir, and include Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun and Looking for Transwonderland by Noo Saro-Wiwa.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
My advice would be to take every writing assignment you can possibly acquire when you’re starting out. All writing—no matter what it’s about—can feed your skills with narrative, pacing, and especially with language itself. I cut my teeth on early restaurant reviews, hotel reviews, and other wide-ranging assignments that taught me critical skills about writing—and nothing trains productivity like a deadline. For writers, any time on the page is time well-spent.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
I’ll offer three. Never regretting any travel you’ve done or will do. Having the gift to alchemize your travel into language and communicate it through narrative. And finally, maintaining an openness to new experiences as a primary value in life.
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