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Home» Travel Blog» Talking Travel Writing at AWP 2016 Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  03.19.16 | 12:30 PM ET I’ll be moderating a panel on travel writing—Does Travel Writing Have a Place in the Age of Instagram and Google Earth?—at the AWP conference in Los Angeles on Saturday, April 2. I’ll be joined by World Hum contributors Tom Swick and Pam Mandel, as well as travel writer and novelist Janis Cooke Newman. If you’ll be at the conference, stop in and say hi!

Home» Travel Blog» 2016 Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  08.09.16 | 1:46 PM ET This year’s Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference—or as many justly call it, summer camp for travel writers—kicks off Thursday in Corte Madera, California. If you’ve ever wanted to study travel writing with a host of accomplished writers and editors, this is the time and place.

Back to The Beach: A Lost Interview with Alex Garland Twenty years ago, Frank Bures chatted with a young Alex Garland about his travel novel,... A Sort of Homecoming Ivana Waz left Serbia for America when she was 14. She returned to her homeland with her son to answer the question: Was she more Serbian or American? How Korean Karaoke Changed My Life After being turned away from the school choir, Lavinia Spalding lost her love of public singing. Then she moved to South Korea.

Home» Features» Travel Stories» Walking Off Writer’s Burnout Travel Stories: Jeff Biggers hadn't written anything original in months. The joy was gone. Then he and a friend went for a stroll in Bologna. I‘ve never had a problem with writer’s block. Just the opposite. Over the past decade, I’ve churned out several books, written hundreds of articles, blogs, book reviews, performed monologues and logged in more caffeine-fueled overnighters than a grave digger.

Home» Features» Travel Stories» Road Trip to the Spiritual Assembly Travel Stories: When her Aunt Noonie needed company on an annual pilgrimage, Nancy Davis Kho tagged along. Just how "woo-woo" would things get? Growing up, it was not uncommon for gatherings with my mom’s extended family to include an assessment of which kids were showing psychic powers, or whether the Magic Eye pendulum had predicted rain for the weekend.

Home» Features» Travel Interviews» Back to The Beach: A Lost Interview with Alex Garland Travel Interviews: Twenty years ago, Frank Bures chatted with a young Alex Garland about his travel novel, The Beach. Bures recently unearthed the interview--a time capsule from the dawn of global backpacking. In 1999 I was working in the literature section at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, when I came across an intriguing title. The novel was called The Beach, and it was about backpackers in Thailand.

Home» Features» Travel Stories» Riding the Slot Travel Stories: As she struggled to make sense of her father's final days, Lenore Greiner sailed across a treacherous patch of San Francisco Bay Watching my father wither like a leaf about to fall, I couldn’t make sense of his impending death. After a sad, shell-shocked week in my childhood home, I received a call from an old friend, Tom, who invited me to spend a day sailing on San Francisco Bay.