Tour stop #3: The loneliness of a shopping mall book signing

Waldenbooks, Salina Central Mall

Having completed my first and only shopping-mall-based Marco Polo Didn’t Go There book-signing, I now know what it feels like to be a public social oddity — to have people furrow their brows at you in bafflement at the sight of you, or avoid eye-contact altogether as they walk by. At times, as I sat in front of the Waldenbooks outlet in the Salina Central Mall with a stack of my books, I felt less like an author than one of those guys who gets hired to dress up in a chipmunk costume and hand out promotional flyers for a car wash.

In retrospect, I realize it was unrealistic to think that an all-purpose indoor shopping mall in a mid-sized, mid-American city would be a good place to tout my book. After all, your average person heads out to the mall on a Saturday to shop for shoes or catch a movie, not to impulse-buy a travel-themed book by some guy they’ve never met before. However, since the mall Waldenbooks is the only place in Salina where one can buy new books — and since I’m now based out of a small farmhouse about 8 miles southeast of Salina — I figured it would be good form to make an appearance there.

After having participated in more structured book events on college campuses or in indie bookstores (for both my new book and for Vagabonding), I don’t think I was quite prepared for an appearance that basically involved sitting at a table with a stack of my books and greeting passersby. In theory this might seem innocuous enough — that is, until you realize that the only other people doing this in the mall are pushing gym memberships or cell phone plans. Thus, your average Saturday shopper has gotten used to avoiding eye contact with anyone who sits at a table and greets them in a friendly voice.

For someone who is not used to being in such situations, this can be a humbling experience.
Of course, it’s good to be humbled from time to time. As a full-time travel writer, I have the luxury of doing what I love for a living. Not everyone does. Moreover, not everyone cares all that much about world travel, and it was easy to see this at the Salina Mall. Sitting at my little table, I had a stack of cards touting a $500 flight-voucher drawing (thanks to a Bootsnall promotion that ties into my book tour) — but this didn’t get nearly as much attention as the drawing for the Mahindra ML 105 tractor that was parked 15 feet in front of me. Even the folks who filtered in and out of the Waldenbooks were more interested in Halloween kids’ books or the new Christopher Paolini than the book of the guy (me) sitting right there in front of them.

Ultimately, I sold three copies of Marco Polo Didn’t Go There over the course of two hours: One to a Kansas Wesleyan University student who’d heard me speak on campus the previous week; one to the co-owners of Pronto Print, where I occasionally go to make photocopies; and one to a woman who goes to Assaria Swedish Lutheran Church with my parents. About halfway through my stint some of my family showed up, and I spent the last hour of my author appearance reading Halloween books with my nephew Luke and chatting up the various random shoppers who had the temerity to make eye contact with me.

In a way, it wasn’t a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon in Salina. Whereas I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat back and watched families and teens and retired folks interact in the small-town plazas of Europe or South America, I can’t recall ever having done such a thing in my own adopted hometown. Thus, for two hours I got to observe something I might otherwise have missed — the understated Saturday rhythms of an indoor shopping mall in the middle of the country.

And in a way, that was itself a close-to-home travel lesson, even if I didn’t sell many books.

Trashed any hotel rooms lately? Blender interviews Rolf Potts (kind of)

My virtual book tour for Marco Polo Didn’t Go There ended just last week, and — while it was a lot of work — it ended up being quite the success. Over course of ten days, I visited online venues like Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Work Week and National Geographic Traveler‘s Intelligent Travel to answer questions and share stories and photos. CNN.com ended up linking my interview with Budget Travel’s “This Just In” from its front page, and both the New York TimesIdeas Blog and Arts & Letters Daily linked my Q&A at World Hum (which, while not an official part of my virtual tour, did coincide with the event).

During the course of this online tour, I answered all manner of questions about travel and travel writing, including advice for aspiring writers, my most shocking moments as a traveler, and the cross-cultural ramifications of wiping your ass. This was all great, and I loved tackling those kinds of queries.

What I wish sometimes, however, is that someone would ask me the kind of questions they ask rock stars in Blender Magazine.

Ever read Blender? It’s great stuff — a hilarious blend of music advice, brief celebrity interviews, and obsessively categorized music nostalgia and trivia. I mean, sure, I subscribe to The New Yorker, The Economist, Poets & Writers, and a whole pile of travel magazines — but when I return home from a journey to dig into my stack of magazines, I often find myself going for Blender first. It’s just good fun.

Since nobody ever asked my any Blender-style rock star questions during my virtual tour, I think I’ll ask those questions of myself right now. Here goes!

Blender: So, Rolf, when was the last time you trashed a hotel room?

Rolf: Actually, most travel writers don’t need to trash their hotel rooms, even when they’re feeling like rock stars. This is because writers like me start out as budget travelers, and for the most part budget hotel rooms are already trashed.

I mean, how can you hurl a TV set out the window when your room never had a TV set to begin with, and the windows have rusted shut? Why smash a chair against the wall when that chair falls apart when you simply sit in it? Why do ecstasy when you’re already on Imodium and mefloquine? Why abuse the service staff when you have so many cockroaches to contend with?

Even when I end up staying in nice hotels, my experience has taught me that I could never trash a hotel room to the same glorious degree you see when checking in at your average developing-country budget-dive.

Blender: Ever gotten drunk in the home of a celebrity?

Rolf: I have, in the purely technical sense. I’ll admit I don’t visit many celebrity homes, but my cousin once house-sat one of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s homes in San Francisco’s South Bay, and I occasionally went over to visit her and drink beers. I’m sure at some point in there I drank enough to technically be considered drunk — though I’ll admit it wasn’t one of those Dave Navarro Playboy Mansion moments where I, say, tapped a vein and sprayed my name on the wall with my own blood.

I think the most extreme thing I did while boozed up at Woz’s house was go into the garage and play his South Park pinball machine (which is pretty much the same thing I did when I was sober). Plus I passed out in a beanbag once, while watching Dogtown and Z-Boys on Tivo. Can Dave Navarro claim that? In Woz’s house? I think not.

Blender: You’re in the middle of a book tour now: Tell us, what are the groupies like?

Rolf: I don’t think I have groupies — at least, not in the traditional sense of hot young vixens that you take back to your hotel room and bang next to piles of cocaine and urns full of room-service Hennessy. I mean, for starters I usually don’t stay in hotels on my book tour; I usually stay in the homes of old friends, and my old friends tend to have wives and infant children who might intimidate any groupies that follow me home.

But on a more basic level, I don’t think book tours lend themselves to groupies. For starters, travel writers are too self-contained to travel with an entourage, and an entourage is essential for groupie-procurement. Plus my first book was a rather earnest-minded treatise about time-wealth and long-term travel, and it had a great reader response that has defied demographic stereotype. Thus, while it’s technically possible that some of my fans are sultry young sex bombs who only want to party, most of them tend to be gung-ho travel addicts who are stoked to tell me about their next journey to India or Mozambique or Paraguay.

So while a rock star might disappear after a performance to skinny dip in the hotel pool with a gaggle of aspiring supermodels, I usually end up drinking beers with, say, a 71-year-old woman who wants to bike across Central America, a 37-year-old married couple who want to take a year off and sail around the world, and a bunch of 21-year-old college students who are full of questions about living abroad. I think this is great — I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of human beings than a roomful of current and aspiring vagabonders from all walks of life.

Not that I’ve given up on the idea of groupies. I actually love the idea of groupies; it’s just a matter of timing and logistics. So if you’re a bodacious babe and want to be my groupie, just slip me a note with some rendezvous details after my reading and I’ll see what I can do. We might have to go to your place, though, since we wouldn’t want to disturb my friends’ slumbering infants.

Blender: What was your last brush with the law?

Rolf: Probably the time the Indian army caught me trying to smash up a blockhouse door along the Tibetan border and detained me overnight at an army base near a town called Pooh. The events that led to absurd encounter are too complicated to relate here, but fortunately I’ve detailed the whole story in my new book. Just read Chapter 5 for details.

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There book tour: Salina and Wichita

After just two days on the road promoting Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations From One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer, I have learned one important lesson: Sex sells.

Or, at least, sex gets people’s attention in an otherwise staid bookstore environment. This is something I discovered by accident, when I arrived in Wichita for an event at Watermark Books and realized I’d left my laptop (and standard PowerPoint presentation) back on my farm, 90 miles away.

My forgetfulness, I think, was the result of my micromanaged book tour. Having written a book called Vagabonding, which is all about the pleasures of slow and deliberate travel, embarking on a strictly scheduled book tour is kind of a contradiction. This was the case when I toured to promote Vagabonding in 2003, and it is doubly the case on this book tour, which will visit twice as many cities as I did 5 years ago.

Pico Iyer, who is one of the most perceptive travel writers of the past two decades, once noted that going on a book tour is “a journey into the fracturing of self.” Travel writers might be naturally equipped to withstand the physical journey, but the psychic journey is another matter.

Iyer noted:

“You pantomime yourself in many moods at every turn, and try to sell what’s deep by being shallow; you are obliged, in some ways, to project a personality in order to advance what at some level comes from the impersonal. You move, at great speed, between radio stations, hotel
rooms and airports, and continuity (even inwardly) is what you lose. Whatever is private in you, spacious and inward-even if it is only a deeper level of the personality-is converted into something public, vocal and worldly.”

For the most part I don’t mind the “public and vocal” version of myself that emerges during book tours; in some ways, it’s a nice counterbalance to the elastic anonymity of vagabonding travel. The challenge comes in striking the right balance — of communicating something true about my own experiences while at the same time giving the audience something useful and instructive.

For my Vagabonding tour this was pretty simple, since that book has a direct application for everyone who reads it. My new book, however, is a collection stories rather than a volume of adviceor philosophy. In many ways it is a more entertaining read than Vagabonding — and for the book-tour audience to appreciate its appeal, this means I have to capture the right moments of humor and intrigue when I’m reading from its pages.

One obvious story for this task is Chapter 7, “Tantric Sex for Dilettantes,” which uses the second-person voice to capture an obsession I had with a certain woman while taking a Tantra class at an ashram in Rishikesh, India. Not only is this story strong on plot and structured like a joke, it also contains lots of great little details about, say, how to control your ejaculation using both physical and spiritual methods.

The only problem with this story is that I feared it’s sexual themes and occasional strong language might turn off library and bookstore audiences, which tend to be older and (so I presumed) more conservative than, say, your average bar reading audience. For this reason I gave “Tantric Sex” a miss at my library book-launch reading in my adopted hometown of Salina.
For the most part, that reading went well. About 20 people showed up, the library served wine and cheese, and there were enough audience questions to keep us going until closing time.

In Wichita, however, I got thrown off by the fact that I forgot my laptop (which contains a travel photo presentation to go with my talk), and I had to take a three-hour round-trip road trip back to my farm to fetch it. When I returned to Watermark Books just five minutes before my event
began, I was too flustered to care, so I opened up by reading “Tantric Sex for Dilettantes,” ejaculation references and all.

As it turned out, the 50 or so people in the Wichita crowd loved the Tantric essay — the older folks as much as anyone. My enthusiasm fed off of theirs, and it ended up being a great little event, even as we transitioned into the more practical matters of travel writing and opened things up for questions.

Thus my first lesson as my new book tour gets underway: For best effect, try a little titillation before you transition into straight information.

Two book events down, about 24 or so to go!

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There … but Rolf Potts did

Rolf Potts, author of the great philosophical/travel/how-to book Vagabonding, has just wrapped his “virtual book tour,” in support of his new book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There.

On his tour, he chatted with various people about life as a travel writer, the themes he explores in his new book, and much more. If you want to see where he’s been and who he’s talked to — well worth your time, whether you’re an aspiring writer or a travel junkie! — be sure to check the links below.

Now that Rolf’s virtual book tour is complete, he’ll be embarking on a real book tour, and on that tour, he’ll be keeping a virtual diary — right here at Gadling! Starting very soon, Rolf will be joining Gadling to discuss, among other things:

  • what it’s like to travel around the US and talk about one’s travel writing;
  • the bad reputation travel writing tends to get in the critical milieu;
  • how to deal with the occasional oddball at book readings (i.e. people who ask 10-minute questions that aren’t really questions);
  • getting drunk in the homes of famous people;
  • the worst diseases he’s suffered on the road, the worst border crossings and bureaucracy, the most overrated and underrated fellow travelers by nationality, his weaknesses as a travel writer, and more.

Visit Gadling to see what Rolf has to say! If you have any questions for Rolf, let us know, and maybe — if you’re really, really lucky — he’ll answer them.

Alternatively, you can see Rolf in person at one of 20 cities nationwide as he celebrates the release of Marco Polo Didn’t Go There (Travelers’ Tales, 2008). We encourage you to ask for the book at your favorite local bookstore or Amazon.com.

Where has Rolf been? Who has he talked to?
  • Among other things, Tim Ferriss spoke to him about how to find interesting, life-affecting experiences.
  • At Budget Travel, they asked him lots of things, including the difference between “travelers” and “tourists.”
  • BootsnAll tossed him numerous questions, including asking what’s wrong with staying ON the tourist trail.
  • Vagabondish queried Rolf about the similarities between Pusan, Korea and north-central Kansas.
  • Over at The Lost Girls, Rolf summed up 7 key lessons all aspiring travel writers should bear in mind.
  • Matador Pulse got him to reveal some travel stories he just can’t write (yet).
  • At Brave New Traveler, Rolf noted how backpackers can go through a more “life affecting process” than “standard” tourists.
  • Jaunted got him to weigh the differences between toilet paper and ass-washing (and you may be surprised at how appealing ass-washing sounds when you’ve finished reading).
  • Though primarily a writer, Rolf shared some of his favorite travel photos with Intelligent Travel (be sure to read the images’ accompanying notes!)
  • Here at Gadling, Rolf told us about his future plans.
  • BONUS: For all you geeky english students out there, be sure to check out the interview on World Hum, in which the author ruminates on how narrative travel writing has changed in recent years, which contemporary author has had the greatest creative effect on travel writing as a literary exercise, and what’s had the largest impact on “writing” in the past decade.

Talking Travel with Rolf Potts, author of the new book “Marco Polo Didn’t Go There”

Rolf Potts has inspired more people to travel than any writer working today. His first book Vagabonding motivated my first long-term trip, and I’ve run into countless travelers who have said the same thing.

Rolf’s newest book is a collection of stories called Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations from One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer. He recently took the time to answer a few questions about his newest book, his favorite places in the world, and his upcoming show on the Travel Channel.

1. Your new collection of stories and essays has a rather puzzling title: Marco Polo Didn’t Go There. Where does it come from?

I’ll give it to you straight from the introduction chapter:

[Excerpt]

The title of this book is not my own creation: It is a direct quote from an inmate I met at Bangkok’s women’s prison in January of 1999. At the time I had been a full-time travel writer for less than a month, and I’d been telling people I planned to travel across Asia in the footsteps of Marco Polo.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I found it necessary to say this. I guess I was just following the presumed formula of what travel writers were supposed to do.

Indeed, at the very moment I was setting out from Asia, various travel scribes were researching or publishing books that diligently traced the international footsteps of Captain Cook, Che Guevara, Moses, Sir Richard Burton, William of Rubruck, John Steinbeck, Lewis and Clark, Robinson Crusoe, Ibn Battuta, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Herman Melville. Journeying in the footsteps of others had, it seemed, become the travel-literature equivalent of cover music – as common (and marketable) as Whitney Houston crooning Dolly Parton tunes.

As it turned out, my own “footsteps” ruse lasted less than one month before I found my way into the visiting room of a women’s penitentiary just outside of Bangkok. As unusual as it might sound, visiting Western prisoners was all the rage among backpackers when I’d arrived in Thailand. In cafes and guesthouse bulletin boards along Khao San Road, photocopied notices urged travelers to take a day off and call on prisoners at the various penitentiaries around Bangkok. Figuring this might be an interesting deviation from the standard tourist-circuit activities, I went to the American embassy and received a letter of introduction to an unlucky drug trafficker named Carla.

Brief acts of presumed kindness carry a whiff of narcissism: As I took a series of buses through the snarl of Bangkok traffic to the edge of the city, I imagined Carla to be a weary, desperate woman who would thank mefor the small gift of magazines and the encouragement to keep persevering behind bars. In reality, Carla was a tough, pretty Puerto Rican woman who arrived in the visitor’s room fifteen minutes late smelling like shampoo, and regarded me with ambivalent cordiality. After speaking for a while about her own situation (her fateful decision to make a quick buckdelivering Thai heroin to New Jersey for an acquaintance; her plans upon her release in nine more months), she began to steer the conversation toward me.

“Why did you come to Thailand?” she asked.

“My primary goal is to follow the route of Marco Polo through the Orient.”

“Oh yeah?” Carla said. “Where are you going after Bangkok?”

“North,” I said. “Probably to Chiang Mai for a while.”

“Chiang Mai?” Carla raised a skeptical eyebrow at me. “Marco Polo didn’t go there.”

Though I didn’t know it at the time, this simple observation was to change the way I traveled, far beyond Asia.

2. Are you looking forward to the upcoming book tour? Do you have dates and locales picked out yet?

I’m definitely looking forward to the book tour, as I always enjoy meeting readers and talking to audiences. I’m in the middle of my Kansas leg at the moment, and when that’s finished I’ll continue on to Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, New York, Camden, Portland, Bellingham, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This will take me right up to Thanksgiving.

You can check out the details on the events page at my website.

3. Asking a seasoned traveler which are his favorite places in the world is a bit like asking a mother which is her favorite child. But can you take a shot at sharing some of your favorite countries or cities?

You’re right — it’s always a tough assessment. Since the early days of my international vagabonding I’ve been a big fan of Laos, Burma and Mongolia — though I haven’t been back to any of those countries since 2003. I go to Paris every summer to teach a creative writing workshop at the Paris American Academy, and I’ve really come to love that beautiful city, despite my weak French language skills. Last year I went to Havana and really came to love Cuba. And there are some other places I want to go back and get to know better — Argentina, Ethiopia, India, Australia. The list could go on.

Of course the place I’m really getting to know better these days is Kansas, where I’ve had a little farmhouse on 30 acres since 2005. I’m actually not there very many days a year, but when I am home I learn a lot about slowing down and getting to know one place.

4. Several of the stories in your new book originally appeared on the internet. What do you see as the benefits and drawbacks of writing for an internet audience?

A big benefit in my experience has been narrative flexibility. At places like Salon and World Hum and Slate I’m really able to take stories in my own personal direction, without the space or photo considerations that might come with writing for a glossy travel magazine. These stories also have more reach, since they’re available worldwide and can be accessed as easily now as the day they came out.

As for drawbacks — well, I’ve been writing for online venues for so long that I really can’t think of any, off the top of my head. I’m used to the format, and it works for me

5. Rumor has it you’re working on a new show for the Travel Channel. Can you give us any details about it?

You bet. The working title of the show is “American Pilgrim,” and it takes a look at the travel conditions of the Mayflower Pilgrims. I’m the host, and basically I travel around the United States meeting with the descendants of those first Pilgrims and talking about the challenges they faced. If all goes according to plan, the one-hour show should debut on the Travel Channel on Thanksgiving Day around prime time. I fly to England at the end of this month for a couple days to record voiceover narration.

Of course, people who are familiar with my writing might wonder why I’m doing a show about American cultural history when I’ve established myself as an independent and international travel guy. I wondered the same thing at first, but I guess they wanted a younger host to inject some energy into what might be seen as middle-aged subject matter. It was a good way to get some experience in front of the camera, and I actually had a really great time shooting it. I can’t imagine I’ll turn my career over to television anytime soon — I will always be a writer first and foremost — but I look forward to doing occasional TV documentary work in the future.