New Year, New Class

By Larry Habegger | January 2nd, 2007 | No Comments »

We’ve rolled into a new year and I’ve got a couple of slots open in my ongoing Advanced Travel Writing workshop that meets the second Thursday of each month in San Francisco. The group has been meeting monthly for about two years with a maximum of ten participants. If you’re interested, let me know.

I’ve also been planning a new workshop this winter, but will probably start it in February instead of January. For information, see the description on my “Teaching” page.

A Thought for Christmas

By Larry Habegger | December 8th, 2006 | 2 Comments »

A few years ago I was in Australia in the weeks before Christmas and found myself in Adelaide. I didn’t know much about the city, but what I discovered there prompted a simple story I call “Christmas Carols in Adelaide.” Here it is, below.

Christmas Carols in Adelaide

I didn’t have high hopes for Adelaide. No one I knew had ever said anything good about it. They’d raved about Melbourne and Sydney, even Darwin, but Adelaide hadn’t generated much enthusiasm. So I planned just one quick overnight before heading up to the tropical Northern Territory after a week in the arid outback of South Australia.

I was staying six miles from Adelaide’s city center in Glenelg, right on the beach at the end of a streetcar line adjacent to Moseley Square. The December sun was still high above the sea when I looked out my window and saw the party going on. The wide, brown beach was full of people enjoying themselves. The sea was calm, a bay without breakers, and people were strolling along a jetty that reached far out into the harbor. I was hot, tired, and dirty after a long ride from the outback, and it took a heartbeat to decide the best way to cool off was to go for a swim in the sea.

The water caressed me as I swam back and forth, floated endlessly under the blue sky wondering if I should just stay there until the sun went down. I didn’t, but after I took a shower and looked out my window again, I knew I had to be outside. It was one of those moments when everything conspired to create good feelings: the balmy evening, the sunset, the people enjoying the festivity of simply being out together seemingly with no cares.

Read the rest of this entry »

Motionsickness Interview

By Larry Habegger | December 1st, 2006 | No Comments »

Larry Habegger, executive editor of Travelers’ Tales Books, publisher of the popular line of travel narrative collections, answered email questions from Motionsickness editor Steve Wilson.

Motionsickness: Whose idea was it to go into the travel publishing business and why did you decide to publish collections of narratives instead of say, guidebooks?

Larry: The idea really came from Tim [co-founder James O’Reilly’s brother] and James looking for ways to work together, and for James and me to move beyond the freelance scramble. Tim was very successful as a technical book publisher, and James and I were traveling a lot and writing about it. Tim wanted to have some of the fun we were having, and we, of course, wanted some of the financial success Tim had found. We all wanted to give travelers/readers more useful information than could be generally found in the publishing industry, whether it be books, magazines, or newspapers, and we felt that the best way to accomplish this was through stories, real stories of real people and the extraordinary things that happened to them in their travels. We’ve always felt that information is communicated far more effectively through stories. You connect with them, team lessons, and absorb information in ways that you simply can’t when it’s obtained from practical sources. Apart from this belief that nothing like Travelers’ Tales existed, that what readers needed was a series of books of true stories by travelers, we didn’t want to enter an already crowded field and go head-to-head with other guidebook publishers. Our concept was a very different kind of travel book, one that would create and fill its own niche.

Read the rest of this entry »