Rolf Potts

When Annie Dillard died at age 81 last week, I immediately thought of my father, who kept a copy of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on our family bookshelf.

A few times each year, a reporter from some traditional venue (outlets like Reuters or the Washington Post or Foreign Policy) will reach out to me, as a veteran travel writer, for my professional perspective about some aspect of the travel experience.

Daniel Scheffler is a travel writer who writes about cultural travel, identity and the human stories that shape how we move through the world.

On nostalgia On travel photographs On human nature On the souvenir trade On mortality More about the book

By Rolf Potts Back in 1981, when I was ten years-old and in the fourth grade, I drew a poster that illustrated everything I loved and hated about the world.

Brendan Shanahan is a writer and painter, living in Australia.

(author’s note, 2026) The following short story was published in the August/September 1998 issue of an online literary magazine called Eclectica.

Back in 2005, when I moved into my prairie double-wide in rural Kansas, I bought a sturdy used desk at the local DAV Thrift Store for $35.

Angie Chuang is an author and educator based in Denver, Colorado.

1) Never explain something you can dramatize Master storytellers never explain.

One interesting footnote to the journey Kiki and I made through Switzerland and Austria a few months ago was that we accidentally traversed the micro-nation of Liechtenstein as our train made its way from Chur to Innsbruck.

Longtime New York Times contributor Perry Garfinkel has also written for National Geographic Magazine, The Travel Channel, Travel & Leisure, and AARP the Magazine, among many others.

Amid our Vienna sojourn a few months ago, Kiki and I saw all manner of kitschy Mozart and Freud and Klimt socks for sale — and at the Leopold Museum Kiki splurged on a pair of socks depicting Egon Schiele’s 1910 “Self-Portrait with Striped Shirt.”

1) Solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity Solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity.

Caroline Van Hemert is an Alaska-based writer and wildlife biologist.

This week I appeared on Yonder Radio, an hour-long audio show and podcast produced by the Center for Rural Strategies, to talk about my feature-length found-footage video essay Kansas Never Plays Itself, which draws on a century of film to analyze how cin…

I’ve noted here before that I’m regularly interviewed by traditional news outlets seeking my perspective, as a veteran travel writer, about various aspects of travel and tourism.

1) Capturing an experience while you are having it alters the way you experience it Capturing an experience while you are having it alters the way you experience it, as Wendell Berry’s poem “The Vacation” describes.

An EMMY-nominated producer, on-camera host, camera operator, writer, and award-winning photographer, Rachel Rudwall has traveled all seven continents, lived in three countries, and journeyed through 80+ nations – all in the name of storytelling.

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1) Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts Confessing and confiding are overlapping concepts, like envy and jealousy, often used interchangeably, but distinct at their cores.

Erin Levi is a Connecticut-born, Montréal-based travel journalist whose work spans the Himalayas, Central Asia, and beyond.

My Deviate podcast has been, since its inception, a pretext to explore topics I don’t typically cover as a travel writer.

Here’s a curious look into AI image enhancement technology, in relation to how we once captured images.

Jen Rose Smith is an award-winning writer and editor living in Vermont’s Green Mountains, where she writes deeply reported features on travel, culture, sustainability, adventure, and place.

1) On the way Americans call football “football” for no cogent reason Americans call football “football” because that’s what Americans want to call it.

I learned many things helping Kiki make her short film, The Game Camera, and I’ll share two of the more curious lessons here.

Natalie Compton is a travel reporter for the Washington Post.

Earlier this year, around mid-October, RolfPotts.com went offline for a few days, due to a DNS glitch that happened as my webmaster was moving the site’s content to a bigger server.

A full transcript of Rolf's 2025 video essay about the role places play in cinema.

One of the pleasures of writing books that eventually prove popular with readers is hearing which quotes and outtakes from a book resonate with people.

Mark Orwoll is the author of four books, including Just One Little Hitch (Pleasant Villain Press, 2024), a travel memoir.

The following Q&A about the writing life was conducted for a class project by a writing student named Josh Hammingh, who attended my undergrad alma mater in Oregon.

This month marks the 25th anniversary of my travel writer interview series at RolfPotts.com.

I: Pilgrims in a Sliding World For almost as long as I’ve been making my living as a writer, I’ve been telling folks about the role that failure has played in my development as an author.

I’ve said before that one of the reasons I named my podcast Deviate (as opposed to, say, Vagabonding) was that I wanted the creative freedom to veer away from the travel issues I’ve covered as a journalist for the past 25+ years, and explore other intelle…

1) On the edifying mission of pre-tourism travel Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment. 2) On the aesthetic compromises of…

Rebecca Hall is a British travel writer who divides her time between the UK and Greece, a country she has called home since 2008 and the main focus of her work.

Between 2013 and 2019 I conducted occasional interviews with my mother, Alice Potts, about various aspects of her life.

When my mother, Alice Potts, died last month, part of the process of working through my grief came in digging into the archive of digital files I have collected over the years to document her life.

My mother, Alice Potts, died peacefully last month in her memory-care assisted-living apartment in Salina, Kansas.

1) On the way trails have made us what we are Trails can be found in virtually every part of this vast, strange, mercurial, partly tamed, but still shockingly wild world of ours.

1) The better the villain, the better the hero The better the villain, the better the hero.

Jen Murphy is an award-winning journalist who splits her time between Boulder and Maui.

1) If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion — it’s probably one of the innumerable clichés which have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that…

1) On the ubiquity of beauty Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.

1) Genre stories help us escape the narratives of our humdrum lives Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate.

Having reported from 120 countries on 7 continents, Robin’s stories and photography have appeared in over a dozen major publications including The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Melbourne Age and National Geographic.

1) On authenticity Now suppose some loon comes up and says: “Have you found the real Asia?”

My father, George Potts, taught science at Fremont High in south-central Los Angeles from 1964-1967.