Smith - Off the beaten page: the best trips for lit lovers, book clubs, and girls on getaways

Copyright 2013 by Terri Peterson Smith

All rights reserved

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-61374-426-0

Cover and interior design: Andrew J. Brozyna, AJB Design, Inc.

Cover photo: Kelly V. Brozyna

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Terri Peterson.

Off the beaten page : the best trips for lit lovers, book clubs, and girls on getaways / Terri Peterson Smith.

pages ; cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-61374-426-0 (trade paper)

1. TravelGuidebooks. 2. Book clubs (Discussion groups)United States. 3. WomenBooks and readingUnited States. 4. Literary landmarksGuidebooks. 5. FestivalsUnited StatesGuidebooks. I. Title.

G155.A1S575 2013

910.4dc23

2012045867

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

To my mom, who taught me the love, of reading, and to Scott, Michael, and Patrick, my favorite travel companions

Too young to go, I read about elsewheres, fantasizing about my freedom. Books were my road. And then, when I was old enough to go, the roads I traveled became the obsessive subject in my own books. Eventually I saw the most passionate travelers have always also been passionate readers and writers.

PAUL THERQUX, The Tao of Travel

W hy do we travel? My favorite answer comes from an essay the great travel writer Pico Iyer wrote for Salon many years ago. He said, 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. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And, we travel, in essence, to become young fools againto slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Why do we read? Substitute the word read for travel in Iyers essay, and for me the answer is much the same. People read to leave their everyday lives and escape to unfamiliar places, to have new experiences, and to learn more about the world and its people. When we escape with a good book, we lose ourselves and sometimes find ourselves along the way, like a traveler wandering the streets and alleyways of a foreign country. Through reading, we discover worlds we would otherwise never experience. Few of us have the time or financial wherewithal to climb Kilimanjaro, tour the Australian outback, or take a months-long grand tour of Europe, but we can go anywhere in a book.

To me, the best of all worlds is to combine reading with travel. Like pairing wine with a delicious meal, one enhances the other. I have loved that combination since grade school, when I read about the places we were going on our annual family vacations while Mom and Dad were loading up the car. For example, reading Esther Forbess Johnny Tremain before a trip to Boston made the citys colonial history and historic places come alive for me. Many years later, when I took my own children to Boston, we read Robert McCloskeys Make Way for Ducklings before the trip. Once there, we all waddled across the street from the Old Corner Bookstore and on over to the Public Garden, diligently following the path of Mack, Jack, Kack, Quack, and the other ducklings. Im sure the boys didnt enjoy it as much as I did; I got to be a kid again.

My book clubs, too, have traveled together to a variety of locales. (As a compulsive reader, Im in two book clubs.) But rather than read in preparation for trips, we traveled in response to books. We started small, with field trips to author readings at local book shops, to movies adapted from a book we had read, and to literary places such as F. Scott Fitzgeralds neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. Eventually, we ventured farther from home. We have gathered at members cabins and eventually traveled to other cities. Each time we started with a story, took a trip related to the book, and, by doing so, forged a deeper connection with the literature, with the place, and with each other.

I began thinking about writing Off the Beaten Page after a book-club trip to Chicago inspired by Erik Larsons The Devil in the White City, a murder mystery that takes place during the 1893 worlds fair in Chicago. We had a blast. Later, whenever I told other women about our adventure, they either remarked that they wished their book groups would do the same thing or began to very enthusiastically relate their own groups travel experiences to me. I know there are about a zillion book groups out there, all meeting in their homes, libraries, or church basements month after month, so I decided to share a few ideas and encouragement to help them take their reading groups out into the world.

Traveling to the places we read about seems really important to me these daysnot just because its fun to travel or because it prevents book-group boredom, but also because traveling encourages empathy. We live in polarized times, when it seems just about everyone looks at the world through the prism of us versus them, and the light that emerges is only two colorsred or blue, rich or poor, coastal and urban or midcontinent rural, black or white, the 1 percent or the 99. The list is endless. If your TV, laptop, or iPad is your sole source of information about the world, you might wonder how people who live in the same country can think, behave, and talk in ways so fantastically different from you. In some ways, its easy to see why we cant understand each other, because the United States is a country with wildly distinctive regions, cultures, and people. For example, Im always fascinated with the extreme contrast between Minneapolis, where I live, and New Orleans. Theyre both on the Mississippi River, but the view from our opposite ends of the river couldnt be more different. Its more than just po-tay-to versus po-tah-to. A native Minnesotan visiting New Orleans for the first time, amid sounds and sensations of zydeco music, humid and hazy air, Spanish moss, Who dat? and crawfish touffe, can probably sympathize with Marco Polo on his first voyage to the Orient. How in the world can we relate to each other?

Reading stories about diverse people and different places offers a degree of understanding. Stories teach a bit about the character of your destination, create a mental picture, and offer a small sense of belonging. If youve read a well-known book or two about the place youre visiting, you have a leg up, like a cultural passport to your destination. And when you travel to that place to connect and experience it personally, the combination of reading and travel helps you see the world in Technicolor rather than in black and white, in three dimensions instead of two. As Mark Twain said in The Innocents Abroad, Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all ones lifetime.

I traveled across the country to research this book and in the process became truly proud and passionate about our fascinating diversity. I want other people to read about it and experience it. Hence, in writing Off the Beaten Page, I hope to whet readers travel taste buds by exploring the places where literature and travel intersect in destinations that are really fun to visit.