What Follows Is An Article I wrote for College Monthly in 1992 on how to cheaply and effectively travel to a new place. It describes specific things to do to make travel easy and breathtakingly inexpensive.
Three winters ago I left California and got a temporary teaching job at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, where the sun peeks over the Southern horizon a few degrees azimuth for a few hours each day, and seeing the ice-fog and sub-zero temperatures, thinks better of staying too long. During Christmas break all alone, for reasons which are probably obvious, I started to fantasize about travel to warmer and more populated portions of the globe. My favorite fantasy was that the following summer I could go to Paris for the 1789-1989 Bicentennial, an event near and dear to my history-lover’s heart.
TRAVEL IS INSPIRING: While I am tolerably certain that Vaslav Nijinsky and Leon Bakst did not absolutely need to go to Greece to respectively choreograph and design the Ancient Greek themed 1911 ballet Afternoon of a Faun, I’m sure it helped. What is more, I expect that they enjoyed it too. And while the IRS probably (in its wisdom) would have frowned upon them trying to deduct it as a business expense (had they been modern Americans), it is true that travel is one of the best methods for any type of artist to get inspiration.
TRAVEL NEEDN’T BE NICE TO WORK: Travel need not be glamorous or expensive or comfortable to be inspiring. It is a recorded fact that Bertolt Brecht wrote most of the rough scripts for his greatest works (Mother Courage, The Good Woman of Szechwan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle) while staying in refugee camps during W.W.II, fleeing the Nazis by walking/hitching rides from Germany to Manchuria, going through Stalin’s USSR. True he wrote the smooth finished drafts of these in the comfort of Southern California, but the inspiration, the ideas, they came from a grueling trek across hostile territory in the midst of a war. Travel is good for an artist if it doesn’t kill her.
