Rolf Potts

@rolfpotts

Author of Vagabonding and three other travel books. Paris Writing Workshop director, erstwhile Yale lecturer. Deviate Podcast host. Itinerant Kansan.

rolfpotts.com/deviate/
Joined December 2008
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  1. Pinned Tweet
    May 13

    Season Two of my podcast Deviate has debuted! Included is an in-depth audio-essay about how travel has changed in the past 20 years. An ongoing episode archive can be found here: Please subscribe on your favorite podcasting service!

    14 likes
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  2. 12 hours ago

    "The flâneur engages in a kind of counter-tourism that involves a poetic confrontation of the supposedly “authentic” life uncluttered by visual/tourist images of that place.”

    1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
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  3. 13 hours ago

    "Avoid the temptation to seek stories, experiences, or quotes that simply back-up a pre-existing idea. Travel writers often fall into is making overconfident generalizations about somewhere from very limited first-hand experience."

    2 retweets 3 likes
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  4. Jun 4

    When I interviewed about mass-shootings and the media weeks ago, I didn't plan this podcast-episode to coincide with an actual mass-shooting event. (Indeed, what happened in Virginia Beach was a sad coincidence.) Insights and perspectives here:

    3 likes
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  5. Jun 3

    "We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate."

    1 reply 3 retweets 16 likes
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  6. Retweeted
    May 30

    Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. —Walt Whitman

    3 replies 65 retweets 181 likes
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  7. Retweeted
    May 31

    200 years ago today, Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, N.Y.

    33 replies 154 retweets 500 likes
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  8. May 31

    "It is how you travel, not where, that defines a dynamic traveler. And it is the job of travel writers to have experiences that are beyond the realm of the average tourist, to go beneath the surface, and then to write interestingly of what they find."

    7 retweets 19 likes
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  9. May 30

    Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia — em (into) and pathos (feeling) — a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws?"

    2 retweets 5 likes
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  10. May 29

    I’m not saying that it’s bad to assuage boredom and loneliness on the road with your smartphone. I’m just noting that these are the same workaday strategies we use to kill time at home – and travel, at its best, is about embracing rather than killing time.

    1 retweet 12 likes
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  11. Retweeted
    May 28

    The New York Times obituary for Tony Horwitz. A terrible loss.

    20 replies 150 retweets 389 likes
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  12. May 28

    "Travel writing need not adhere to the strictures of news journalism; instead it can accommodate leisurely, nuanced, occasionally passionate writing. It can experiment, take risks, have fun."

    1 retweet 5 likes
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  13. May 27

    “While the traveler encounters tourist attractions, the flâneur balances them with equal care and attention for the nuances of the city. His collection of the details of gossip, statements, and facts forms a kind of journalistic recherché in the street.”

    8 likes
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  14. May 27

    I never thought about it this way until made this graphic, but my three mushroom-inquisitive podcast interviews with do more or less constitute a "Magic Potts Trilogy." Details here:

    2 likes
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  15. May 27

    "Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

    1 retweet 9 likes
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  16. May 24

    "Unlike the thoughts I entertained back in my 20s, which were usually confined to my own mind or to a small group of friends, thoughts today tend to immediately go public. Often, a thought instantly converts into a tweet. There’s no introspection phase."

    1 retweet 4 likes
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  17. May 23

    This week on the podcast I talk to about all things travel-related, including how to take the attitude of travel home with your once the journey itself is done.

    5 likes
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  18. May 23

    "Travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance."

    4 retweets 16 likes
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  19. May 22

    Indonesia is the kind of place you might visit to chill out in a single beautiful place and recharge for a month or two: swimming each morning; going for long hikes; learning a bit of the local language; reading all the books you’ve been meaning to read.

    8 likes
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  20. May 22

    "This constant conviction that everything was better before all the lame outsiders ruined it is a big part of any bohemia. And traveler culture really is a bohemia, perhaps the last one, a collection of middle-class romantics tripping on wanderlust."

    1 reply 7 likes
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  21. Retweeted
    May 21

    Things I used on my first overseas trip (1992) I wouldn’t even think to use now: 1) Poste Restante 2) International calling card 3) Travellers Cheques 4) Walkman 5) Mix tape (one only) 6) International Student Card 7) Film 8) Stamps You?

    87 replies 31 retweets 183 likes
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