It was supposed to be easy: Teaching travel writing. After all, I’d been teaching for more than a decade, with essays picked for , a decently regarded book of essays about the Middle East, and even a piece about the time I walked from New York to New Orleans. I’d been to Yemen, had a favorite restaurant in Baghdad, and could tell you the best place to eat North Korean food in Riyadh.
But in ten years at UCLA, I had mostly been teaching outside my expertise—a composition class about Los Angeles, a creative writing class for pre-meds, and a general journalism course for English majors—and what a strange feeling it was to at last preach the genre I supposedly knew best. I was scared. Sometimes you get what you want and it’s harder than what you didn’t.
Then protests came to my campus—the same quarter I was teaching travel writing—and suddenly the most interesting story was located, in fact, about 100 feet from the classroom. Would I be able to get students excited about the idea of going somewhere? (I myself rarely went anywhere.) What would it feel like to teach about travel when the best advice I could give was to go nowhere and stand up for something? * I left Miami in 1997 to attend college in California and when I was 19 I hitchhiked to Alaska and worked on a fishing boat and then in a cannery and then I transferred to a college back east and almost immediately dropped out to work at a newspaper in Cambodia.
There I met the woman I’d marry and we moved to .