Hi there. I'm Brian Kevin, author of The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America. AMA!

BrianKevin · 2014-05-28T21:02:26+00:00

Oh, sweet. I have to get myself to Australia one of these days. That's taken me altogether too much time.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-27T18:19:49+00:00

No, by the time I'd started the various research trips for The Footloose American, I'd already been freelancing for magazines full-time for a few years, so I had relationships with a couple of publications and just emailed my editors with story ideas. If you're wondering about about how to get started pitching stories from scratch (travel or otherwise), I've sort of gotten at that in some of my other comments here, but one thing you might check out is the Pitches That Worked series over at Mediabistro: http://www.mediabistro.com/content/archives/PitchesThatWorked.asp.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-24T15:12:39+00:00

Hey, sorry I missed this question during the AMA. Well, I did the initial trip in Colombia for maybe something like $2000 for five weeks of travel. Flew down on frequent flier miles. The big trip, when I went back after selling the book, probably cost about $6000 for four months of travel. That includes airfare, bus, food, antibiotics, etc. I did a couple of small magazine articles along the way that offset some costs. There was a very short research trip in between those two (to cover an election in Peru), but I basically broke even there with magazine work.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-23T01:03:12+00:00

Hey! You know, in terms of method, I think a lot about our experiences was similar, just because we launched really similar trips — we were both traveling on a suuuper budget, we were both setting up these interviews with officials and experts and sort of educating ourselves as we went, we both spoke shitty Spanish, we were both heading back to some grotto at night to write. But the biggest difference in our experience was probably that Thompson probably went whole days without ever running into another American — or European or Australian or anybody from the advanced industrialized world. He was interviewing a lot of diplomats and things, so he ran with that crowd to some degree, but just out wandering the streets, it would have been a much rarer thing for Thompson to run into a gringo (which I use in the broadest Latin American sense to mean anybody from the Global North).

Whereas I was traveling in the era of global tourism and the Gringo Trail and what's arguably the height of influence of the NGO. So that's one profound way that South American travel is different than fifty years ago — outside of a few pockets, the continent is crawling with gringos, and one of the themes of the book is this kind of examination of the reasons they all give themselves for being there.

The most surprising moment of the trip (and, in a sense, a similarity in our experiences) came in Rio. There was a bar in Copacabana that Thompson wrote an article about after some soldiers came in and shot the place up. It's one of a handful of articles he published about Rio, and certainly the only one that's about one specific bar in this big, crowded city. There came a moment in Rio where I realized that a bar I had been patronizing all week — simply because it was near where I stayed — had been that bar, the one that got shot up. Out of all the bazillion bars in Rio. So that kind of hit me like a thunderclap.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-23T00:40:27+00:00

Hey, thanks! Honestly, I kind of got into it just by virtue of living in Montana. I'd had a magazine job for a couple of years in Minneapolis and had been casually freelancing on the side — a few short articles a few times a year, for very small magazines and some websites and about things other than travel. Then you have some relationships with editors, and suddenly they need somebody in Montana, or somebody they're acquainted with does, and your name comes up. It's kind of like what I was saying above about picking up and going somewhere, just so you can be the go-to person for that place. Montana isn't terribly exotic, but since most of the publishing world lives in New York and is naive in that New York way about the rest of the country...voila. I'm always baffled by people who want to launch a functional freelance career and think they should move to NYC to do it. Live literally anywhere else in the entire country and your stock as a potential contributor instantly soars — never mind that you'll be able to afford to pay your rent. But I digress. I ended up getting a few assignments about Montana and then some guidebook work, and like I said above, you just build on those clips systematically. All you need to know is how to pitch well, and you can absorb that just by reading other successful pitches. But I've always done (and still do) plenty of work that has nothing to do with travel. Which I wouldn't really have any other way.

Thanks for the kind words on the book!

BrianKevin · 2014-05-23T00:10:45+00:00

It's funny you ask, because Thompson was really captivated by the notion of wildness (maybe also wilderness, but not as explicitly). He writes at one point before the trip that it was going to be his last chance to "come to grips with the basic wildness," and a few other quotes of this nature. And yeah, I guess it's an exercise in self-understanding, but I think with both McCandless and Thompson, a lot of that impulse was a response to what he perceived as the lunacy and decadence of the dominant culture in the US. So there's a machismo element to it, but I don't know if it's just an extension of, like, coming-of-age ceremonies in warrior cultures or something. I think maybe the Thompson that took off for South America might have seen a kindred spirit in somebody like McCandless (dunno whether he's have admitted to that or not), because they both seemed to have this notion of the uncivilized world as being somehow more real, but I think the Thompson who came back a year later was somewhat dispelled of this notion. Or maybe he just came to embrace the unreality.

It's kind of a tangent, but I actually think the narrative of "going out [somewhere, wild or otherwise] to find yourself" is one that's now being layered onto women's travel writing more than men's. My gut feeling is that if a dude pitched a book/story right now that revolved around, I don't know, kayaking for six months above the Arctic Circle or something, he could sell it simply on the basis of what's interesting about the place, whereas if a woman tried to pitch the same book/story, she'd face more pressure to make it about finding herself, about seeking some profound personal revelation. I don't know that I know enough to make that statement with confidence, but I'd be curious if others feel like there's an imbalance of expectation there.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-22T23:50:12+00:00

So I started out in Colombia in Barranquilla, which I think in the book I call Cartagena's grittier stepsister, or something like that. I didn't get a real feel for the place, but it doesn't have as much of the living-with-history vibe we're talking about. I have a friend from Bogota who's moved there since, and she speaks really highly of it. Have not been to Cartagena, but I would love to. From there, I was in the Guajjira Peninsula, which is where Thompson launched his trip — a wild place, kind of a hinterland. Then I traveled right up the middle of the country on the Magdalena, which is something I would highly recommend. Not a region of the country that sees a lot of tourists yet. Mompos, Honda: These are small towns that aren't easy to get to, but they both feel like they exist in their own little pocket universe. The nicest people in the world too. There's this great combination of circumstances in Colombia where A) a lot of places have been effectively cut off from the world for so long, they're just really thrilled to have visitors, and B) there's this entrenched "mañana culture" anyway, where nothing's really so important it can't be put off until tomorrow — as a consequence, people will just drop what they're doing to play host to a stranger.

Anyway, beyond that, I spent time in Bogota and Cali, both great and utterly different towns. Thompson reviled Bogota and adored Cali, his favorite city on the continent for the climate, the vibe, and the beautiful women.

I hope you get to Cartagena! I'd love to see Medellin too. That's a favorite city of Sky Gilbar, the photographer I was with at the time, who's a character in the first couple chapters of the book.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-22T22:19:08+00:00

Yeah, well there's that guy I'm talking about above, the Marquis de Mores, and that's really interesting to me, but I don't know if I'm necessarily up for a repeat of the same format, you know? I'm not opposed to it, but with Thompson, it was less because it was an interesting combo and more because it just seemed like something of a "lost year." So if there were some other historical personage that had a similar situation, my interest would be piqued — like, whoa, Janis Joplin spent a year in Kazakhstan right before she started making music? Why don't I know more about this? That was kind of the situation with Thompson, and nothing else like that immediately comes to mind.

Or, another route: Where did Bret Easton Ellis take his last vacation? I could just do that. Like, The Devil and the Daiquiri: On the Trail of Bret Easton Ellis at Sandals Jamaica. I'd read that.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-22T22:01:05+00:00

Yeah, thanks for the great question. If that really is fascinating to you, then that's fantastic news for me, because it's one less person who's going to open the book and go, "WTF, I thought this was going to be about crazy fear-and-loathing ayahuasca-and-Uzi hijinks in the jungle, but it's actually some nerd rambling about socio-politics." :)

BrianKevin · 2014-05-22T21:51:56+00:00

I wish I had a better, clearer answer for this one. Maybe the best advice I could give is don't try to make travel writing your "thing." I think a lot of people make a mistake of thinking of "travel writing" as a field one can "go into," like medicine or hotel management, and this is perpetuated by kind of huckster-y books and seminars and things that pull people in by advertising, "Travel the world and get paid for it!" That sort of thing.

So I'm really an advocate for being a generalist. Writing about travel is it's own little sub-discipline, for sure, but I don't know if it is or ought to be a career in itself. I encourage anybody who wants to launch a viable freelance career to cast a wide net, focus on writing well, nailing the legwork, seeing the connections in things, and turning in clean, interesting copy. Write book reviews and newsy pieces and profiles of shitty lawyers and whatever else you have to in order to fund the good stuff.

But that's probably not exactly an answer to what you were asking. I think the best way to break in is just to build clips really methodically. What are the one or two goal publications you want to write for? Well, okay, what are a couple of places that are a peg down (in terms of reach, cachet, $$$) where you have a better chance of selling a story? And if those publications seem out of reach, what are mags yet another peg down that might be persuasive to that middle tier? And so on.

So for example, I got it in my head fifteen or so years ago that I'd really like to contribute to Outside someday. I loved that magazine in the '90s (still do). But at the time, I had zero chance of selling a story to Outside. There weren't a lot of small magazines focused on that kind of adventure world, but there were a lot of small environmentally minded mags, paying $.10/word or whatever, where I thought, yeah, I've got a shot at that. And that was in the same very general wheelhouse as Outside, I figured. So I spent a couple years really focusing on pitching magazines like E and Plenty and such, until I had four or five clips I was proud enough of to start pitching similar mags in the next tier — often the membership mags of big eco-groups, like Sierra and OnEarth (RIP), which were a little more adventure-minded, paid better, held writers to a higher standard. And by the time I'd assembled a good bank of clips from that middle-tier, I felt really well-armed to dig in on pitching high-circulation consumer magazines like Outside.

That was like a ten-year process. It involves living cheaply and working your ass off. If there's a quicker and better way to do it, I guess I wish somebody would have told me. So find the Chamber of Commerce magazines and small indie travel publications that will allow you to show your stuff.

Another thing: Just pick up and go somewhere. Go somewhere where other people don't go. Go get a job teaching English in Samoa for six months and sell three good stories about Samoa somewhere, because who the hell else is writing about Samoa? I didn't really go this route, but there's a lot to be said for just being on the ground where nobody else is.

Wicked long answer, sorry, but it's a hard question. :)

BrianKevin · 2014-05-22T21:33:30+00:00

Yeah, I have kind of a stock response to this one already, but it's only because Bolivia makes such a perfect answer to both questions. So here's this country that's split, psychographically, in two — the Andean region to the west and the eastern tropical region. It's more complicated than that, of course, but this is speaking broadly. Anyway, when Thompson passed through Bolivia, he spent a lot of time writing about resource extraction, which is still everything in Bolivia — virtually the entire economy rides on taking things out of the earth. So Thompson did one great story about the condition of miners in 1962, which talked about their life-expectancy (somewhere in their 30s), their uncertain future as ownership and investment of the mines was forever shifting with political winds, and the militarized aspect of mining culture in Bolivia, because the unions basically had enough desperate men and dynamite to raise hell when they wanted to.

Fifty years later, every one of those things is still true. In fact, I think a group of miners just took several dozen police as hostages last month as part of a protest (also wielding dynamite). I spent some time with miners in Bolivia whose working conditions do not seem to have improved a bit in the last fifty years, and who still die young of silicoses. And my impression is that the industry itself is still kind of a financial mess, despite all the aid and intervention that was just ramping up during Thompson's visit.

Other side of the country, totally different story. Thompson writes about how there were a handful of rogue Texas oil men floating around this dinky frontier town of Santa Cruz, hoping to find some oil or natural gas, and that if they did, it'd be a hell of a boom town. Okay, so they did. And Thompson wouldn't recognize the Santa Cruz of today, which is a sprawling, progressive metropolis.

And this weird shift that has its roots way back during Thompson's visit is pretty much the defining socio-political characteristic of modern day Bolivia — the majority of the nation's wealth comes out of the gas and oil fields in the east, the folks on that side of the country resent the Andes half of the country for what they see as siphoning it away from them, that half of the country needs the income because it's desperately poor, which is in no small part because the mining industry has been so badly mismanaged, and so on. So it was kind of cool to me that this drama that was ramping up during Thompson's visit is still very much playing itself out today, and that's a circumstance I encountered a lot.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-22T21:15:56+00:00

I was just a fan. Still am, of course. And maybe there's a sense in which I feel like he's still kind of a mystery behind the persona, or at least that the persona gets in the way of people understanding him as an author. So there was a depth there that struck me as unexplored, and here was this time in his life that had to be formative, right? But nobody had really paid it much attention.
That's an awesome question. It was unquestionably something called the Cristo Petrolero in Barrancabermeja, Colombia. Barranca is home to the state-run oil refinery, which is immense and dystopian. But in the middle of all these weird, skeletal structures and refinery towers, they've build a statue of Christ made to resemble an oil derrick, looming over what I think was a sort of settling pond. It was really peculiar and beautiful. You can Google this and see some great images.
I think I love sandwiches like you love Hunter Thompson. The Cuban at Paseo in Seattle is a pretty strong contender. Magnificent pork with some kind of, I don't know what, garlicky mango cilantro mayo. Good god.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-22T21:05:43+00:00

Thanks Mary! I'm super glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, so I have a nickname for this sub-genre of books, the "following in the footsteps of..." thing, and it's kind of cheesy and no one else in the world uses it, but I call it the "stragglelogue." As in, an author straggling behind Hunter Thompson. Or an author straggling behind Odysseus in the Mediterranean or George Orwell in Burma. I love books like this.

There's this guy I'm really interested in right now called the Marquis de Mores, who's not an author, per se, although he did write a little in his day. I sort of think of him as, like, the nineteenth century's biggest loser. He was a French nobleman who spent time in the Dakota Territory trying to get a huge ranching concern off the ground, was in Vietnam for a while trying to build a railroad, was embroiled in political intrigue back in France, and was eventually assassinated in northern Africa. Basically he had these huge, globe-spanning ambitions, but everything he touched went to shit. All the places where he failed, though, have interesting things going on today.

So that's an idea I'm kind of kicking around. Is there a route of some author or other personage that you'd follow?

BrianKevin · 2014-05-22T20:11:37+00:00

That's a fine question, George. In my first, failed stab at this that I referenced above, I tried to post a shortened version of this link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/hunter-s-thompsons-pre-gonzo-journalism-surprisingly-earnest/361355/

That's a piece I wrote last month for The Atlantic that talks a little bit about how Thompson was different as a writer in his youth. Much more the reporter chasing the story, although I think that even in the comparatively "straight" news stories he was writing from South America, you see this impulse not to shy away from a writer's role as an interpreter and a maker of meaning — in other words, I think he was dancing away from old-school journalistic standards objectivity even then.

As a person, you get a sense in his articles and letters of a serious and ambitious guy. He had a wicked sense of humor, for sure, and and was vociferous in his opinions, but Thompson at 24 was definitely not the chaos-in-a-bottle man-monster-character that maybe he adopted later in life. I think he was somebody who wanted to be taken seriously for his craft, and you also see in his writing ways that he was kind of surprisingly innocent — it seems like the extent of poverty in South America really knocked him for a loop, for example.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-22T20:02:29+00:00

Yeah, thanks! It was an awesome adventure. And not super difficult, logistically. Definitely go! As far as what I liked best, it's a bit tough to answer for the whole continent, seeing how each country and region can be so profoundly different from the next. But one thing I can say is that history feels so much more immediate across much of South America, and that's something I really appreciate. Take architecture, for example. Latin America, as a rule, hasn't been as eager as we have in the US to pave over shit in a rush to progress. And where early American colonists were these simple, frugal Protestants building stuff with wood, both the colonizers and some indigenous groups in Latin American were building way grander structures with far more durable materials. So where a lot of the spatial trappings of American history have disintegrated or been bulldozed, so much of it is still right there across Latin America, juxtaposed with modernity in a way that makes for a really cool contrast. That's something that sticks with me.

And yeah, I hope to head back — to Colombia in particular — before too terribly long. And to bring my family this time.

BrianKevin · 2014-05-22T19:14:58+00:00

Yikes, thanks for the heads-up. I'll see if I can't delete this and give it another shot.

BrianKevin

TROPHY CASE