Lavinia Spalding has spent three decades telling stories from the road—from the cities of Spain, where she immersed herself in the world of female flamenco guitar; to the streets of Rome, where a chance encounter with an Italian man taught her about kindness and intuition. I’ve been following Spalding’s work for years, and had the chance to work with her on “The Cabin,” her 2019 Longreads essay about longing and belonging in the Utah desert—a piece that showcases her precision and nuance, and her feel for how landscape can be just as much a character as the people in it.
As the seven-time series editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing—an anthology published by Travelers’ Tales, a Palo Alto publisher—she has read thousands of other travel writers’ stories with the same attention she brings to her own. In volume 13, published this week, Spalding continues to bring careful curation to a series that resists easy definition. As she told me, the phrase “women’s travel writing” can summon a narrow set of expectations, and one of the things that makes this series essential is its aim to challenge and expand that picture. “There isn’t just one kind of women’s travel story,” Spalding said, “because there isn’t just one kind of woman.”
Here, she takes us behind the scenes of volume 13: what she looked for in more than 1,600 submissions, why grief and levity can help shape powerful travel narratives, and what she still hopes to see more of in the future. The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 13 is available now—at Amazon, Bookshop, and other places where you buy your books.
This is your seventh time editing The Best Women’s Travel Writing. What felt new or urgent in the pieces you selected for this volume?
Great question! I’ll start with urgency. One of my goals was to provide (insofar as is possible with an essay collection) an antidote to all the fear and xenophobia swirling around us. So I was especially interested in stories that demonstrate our common humanity, and I think volume 13 achieves this—many of the pieces showcase tender interactions between strangers and explore the meaning of the encounter. And while that sort of story isn’t at all new for The Best Women’s Travel Writing (or for women travelers in general) at this moment, it feels more urgent than ever.
Something else that feels important in this volume is perspective taking. I imagine that for many people, the words “women’s travel writing” summon a particular picture or set of expectations of what the story will entail. But there isn’t just one kind of women’s travel story, because there isn’t just one kind of woman. I think it can be too easy to forget that the experience of travel isn’t the same for everyone. And so the pieces in which writers of color and from marginalized communities shared their distinct perspectives—on everything from spirituality to surfing to identity to hair braiding—feels tremendously urgent and valuable.
As for what’s new, there’s probably more variety in this edition than the others I’ve edited. There are stories from all seven continents, and a wide range of theme, form, intensity, and voice. I’ve included a few more reported features than usual, along with more experimental writing. We have several segmented essays, a few that use the second-person point-of-view, an epistolary piece, a braided essay, and even a story about tango that mimics the structure of the dance. I love this about volume 13, because it suggests that more women travel writers are finding nimble and exciting ways to express themselves.
This volume’s pool of submissions included more than 1,600 pieces collected over six years, but you only had space for 27 essays in the book. Can you tell us more about this massive curatorial effort?
Thank you—it really was a massive effort! I started working on it about a year-and-a-half ago, and although a lot of the pieces I considered were nominated by travel magazines and literary journals, the vast majority were unpublished and submitted to my publisher, Travelers’ Tales, or entered in their annual Solas travel writing awards. As a result, the pool included best-selling authors like Roxane Gay and Susan Orlean along with aspiring writers who had never published. I really love stepping into this mix of both established and newer voices.
And yes, the pool was our deepest ever. I initially felt daunted when I saw the number of submissions, since I’ve historically done the bulk of the work myself, aside from a bit of assistance from my mother (who was trained as an editor) and an occasional volunteer reader. But this time I was really fortunate that a writer named Emma Morrell, whose essay I selected early on, asked if she could help with the submissions. I jumped on her offer, and she ended up being enormously helpful and removing that first layer of overwhelm for me. Over time, I organized the essays into folders of “yes,” “strong maybe,” “maybe,” “probably not,” and “no,” and gradually narrowed the prospects to 150, 100, and finally, 75. Emma and I then sorted the stories that had risen to the top by location, theme, mood, and voice, scanning for overlapping elements.
One tricky thing about having “best” in the title is that it implies a competition, which it isn’t—it’s more like a playlist, in that it requires a lot of variety and rhythm.
It’s always a wild ride, reading through the submissions pile and making final selections. One tricky thing about having “best” in the title is that it implies a competition, which it isn’t—it’s more like a playlist, in that it requires a lot of variety and rhythm. What this means is that a great number of exquisite pieces—some of my favorite pieces, in fact—did not make it into the collection. For instance, there were too many wonderful and important stories that took place in Alaska, Antarctica, France, Italy, Mexico, and the US—and countless powerful essays exploring the intersection of travel and grief, or travel and family. Of those, I could choose just a few. Something I’m very happy about, though, is that for the first time, we’ve included a special-mentions page called “More Stories We Love,” so I was able to list 35 additional stories that caught my eye.
I hear you on the challenge of using “best” to describe this kind of effort, which is how we’ve traditionally framed our end-of-year Best of Longreads lists. Same for our weekly Top 5 lists, though I now view these less as a “top” list and more like a stack of letters from old friends. I love that you think about selecting submissions like arranging a playlist.
You mentioned that many submissions explored the intersection of travel and grief. At Longreads, too, we’re pitched so many essays shaped by grief. We’re living, after all, through so many overlapping forms of loss. What do you think grief does to a travel narrative in particular? And I’m curious what distinguished the strongest pieces on the subject?
Grief seems to have the same effect on a travel narrative that it has on life: It offers a new lens and a deeper layer of emotion and understanding. To me, the best travel stories emerge when a writer allows herself to be vulnerable to others and to the place she’s writing about—and grief essentially forces that vulnerability. Travel has the capacity to crack us wide open, and it’s the same with sorrow—so a confluence of the two can lead to really profound breakthroughs. And since everyone has their share of sorrow, essays shaped by grief have a sort of built-in universal resonance, which is something I always look for when reading submissions.
As for what distinguishes the strongest pieces on the subject, one thing that comes to mind is an acute awareness of sublimity. I’m always inspired by writers who are in deep pain—mourning the loss of a loved one or facing other hardships—but are leaning into the awe of an experience and allowing it to act as a kind of touchstone or compass in their healing journey. I think grief turns us more porous, and so everything we experience when we’re traveling—all the unexpected beauty and tenderness that accompanies travel—can feel heightened. Even the smallest delights and kindnesses can become exponentially meaningful.
I think grief turns us more porous, and so everything we experience when we’re traveling—all the unexpected beauty and tenderness that accompanies travel—can feel heightened.
Something else that stands out is levity. Even just a few seeds of humor gives readers a breath of air. In this collection, for example, there’s a completely heartbreaking essay by Ann Hood about the death of her 5-year-old daughter and a trip she took to Mexico to celebrate Day of the Dead. The story includes a scene in which Hood is yelling profanities at an airline agent on the phone, and the subject is so painfully real and raw, but it was also written in a way that made me laugh out loud, which felt like a gift. In another essay, Lisa VanderVeen finds herself in Singapore after vowing to never set foot there because her ex-husband cheated on her there with sex workers. There’s a hilarious scene where she opens her hotel room minibar and finds sex toys—and discovers her hotel is in, of all places, the red light district. I’m not saying there always has to be humor—some situations are just plain devastating—but a touch of lightheartedness can be a counterpoint and respite for the reader.
And then, finally, I think distance often makes for stronger work. It’s so valuable to journal, if possible, through difficult times and process everything on paper—and preserve it, so it’s there to come back to someday. But a lot of the time, when we’re drafting a narrative in the depths of grief, our emotions might be too new and ragged and overwhelming to press print. When we take time—even decades—our work benefits from perspective, and readers benefit from the clarity and wisdom we’ve acquired.
As a longtime travel writer yourself, how has editing this series changed the way you write about place?
Having read too many essays that skim the surface of a place—alongside essays that dive deeper—I’ve learned the importance of researching a destination before visiting. When I was getting my start in travel writing 30 years ago, I assumed it was enough to just experience a place organically and gather impressions and stories on the go. I now see that as naïve—and also a bit lazy and disrespectful. While traveling with “fresh eyes” has its place, if we’re going to write about a culture that isn’t our own, we need to gain as intimate as possible an understanding of it before we visit, so we can do our best to avoid stereotypes and assumptions and extractive narratives. This means educating ourselves about ancient and modern history, from Indigenous peoples to political and social and environmental issues. That knowledge also helps build connection with local people, who appreciate a traveler who has some familiarity with their country. And doing extensive research doesn’t dampen my sense of childlike amazement and curiosity—it deepens it, since I might get very excited about some obscure aspect of a place and then feel more invested, having read up on it. I find that the more I learn before I go, the easier it is for that place to tell me its stories.
Another outcome of editing the anthology is that I see how stories suffer when a writer attempts to fit the play-by-play of an entire experience into a few thousand words.
I’m not sure if this has changed or just been reinforced, but I’ve certainly come to understand the value of writing while in the place I’m trying to capture. I can often sense when a writer has composed an essay from memory and photos, versus one who has harvested details and images from her journal pages. The latter work is so much more evocative and vivid, with precise details and specific senses and feelings. When a writer has obviously taken contemporaneous notes, the stories read as if they’ve been written from the inside instead of the outside, and the observations are original and immediate.
Another outcome of editing the anthology is that I see how stories suffer when a writer attempts to fit the play-by-play of an entire experience into a few thousand words. This is something I’ve struggled with, because of course I find all the parts of my own story interesting. But now, with my own essays, I work harder to keep focused. I remind myself that it’s almost always more effective to focus on just one illuminating slice of an experience and bring that to life on the page, excavating it for the inner story and zooming in close, so I can move beyond shallow observations.
I’m going on here, but one quick note about endings. Every creative writing professor I ever had emphasized the necessity of a strong beginning—You have to hook the reader!—and I took their advice and labored endlessly over my openings. But editing The Best Women’s Travel Writing has taught me that endings are more important, since they’re the reader’s final impression. I’ve included plenty of essays in the anthology that were submitted with underwhelming ledes—it was easy enough to cut them or move them or edit them. But if a writer hasn’t delivered a story to a satisfying and elevating conclusion, I’m much less likely to consider it for inclusion. It’s just not an easy fix. And so, knowing all that, I pay more attention to the endings of my own stories.
What still feels underseen in travel writing, especially by and about women? What kinds of pieces would you like to see more of in the future?
I always want to read more pieces by members of marginalized communities. I love narratives by writers who are navigating life and travel differently than I am, and in ways I’ve never had to consider. To me, part of being an ally involves learning more about how people experience their individual circumstances. I’d really love to read more stories by Indigenous writers, and more narratives from trans writers and those living and traveling with disabilities. These groups contend with some structural barriers to travel, but it’s more important than ever to hear their perspectives.
I’d also like to see more essays recounting personal experiences with climate scientists and others who are fighting to save the planet. I’m a hopeless optimist, so I appreciate when an ecologically themed essay leaves me feeling hopeful and inspired. For instance, I think one of the most interesting pieces in the collection is by Jayme Moye, who shadows a team of Indigenous land and sea rangers through a spawning coral reef in Australia as part of a restoration project that uses a technique called larval reseeding. By the end of the essay, I would have followed her and those rangers anywhere.
On a totally different note, I’m a big fan of stories involving shoestring solo travel in hard-to-get-to places, and there seemed to be fewer of those submissions this time. I noticed an increase in essays about traveling with families and partners and friends and guides and groups. And while I’m happy to include those, too, what I love about rugged solo travel stories is they usually include messy situations with serious implications—and strong connections with people along the way who aid in the writer’s rescue. They often have great tension and strong story arcs and big payoffs in the end. Solo trips are also really ripe for the kinds of epiphanies that only arise from spending a great deal of time alone with a journal.
And finally, again, I’m always looking for levity. Most of the submissions I receive are quite heavy, so I was hungry for humor stories this time—and thrilled whenever an essay came across my desk that made me laugh. Humor is subjective, of course, and it can be hard to pull off—especially when it comes to travel writing, since you never want to risk offending people from other cultures. It can be tricky and delicate. To me, humor in travel literature works best when it’s self-deprecating. But there are some really funny stories in this book, and I’m grateful for them. The world is kind of grim these days. We need all the laughter we can get.
Lavinia Spalding is the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Keeping Traveler, editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and co-author of With a Measure of Grace, This Immeasurable Place, and two editions of the Frommer’s EasyGuide to New Orleans. She has published in The New York Times, Tin House, The Walrus, Longreads, River Teeth, AFAR, Post Road, Off Assignment, Yoga Journal, Sunset, Ms., The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and many other national and international publications. She lives with her family in New Orleans. Visit her on Substack at Writing Away or on laviniaspalding.com.
