I love the clean slate feeling of a New Year. Everything feels as fresh as the brisk January air, with its snap of frost that makes the inside of your nose tingle. Of course, a year is not a precise container; all of my injuries, work stresses, and personal gripes will roll into the new year with me, like the subscription of Entertainment Weekly that kept showing up in our mailbox months after we’d stopped paying for it. And yet! I welcome the restart. There’s a new calendar up on the wall (my annual gift for being a Sierra Club donor). I have a new planner on my desk, its page deliciously blank and welcoming, its cover depicting the Year of the Dragon.
The new year feels like a fitting time for me to reflect back on how I got into writing about travel, my “origin story” in pop culture parlance. I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember. I began by scribbling illustrated stories in crayon about dogs and horses (typically featuring a French poodle, as I thought they were the most beautiful animals in existence—so fancy!). In high school I became a voracious journaler, documenting my angst in excruciating detail in what was basically autofiction (when I die, please burn all those journals along with my body). In college as a theater major, I took a sketch comedy class that made me think for the first time ever that my writing might be good enough to let other people read. I used to spend a three-hour break between classes in the thick cigarette smoke of the student lounge (ah the nineties!), filling notebooks with ideas. There’s nothing like the feverish creative energy of a young brain not yet beaten down by rejection, career stress, and alcohol consumption. I could write two or three sketches in a single sitting, like I was the Alexander Hamilton of college campus sketch comedy. In Solo Performance class, I wrote and performed a piece about Britney Spears and diet pills, in which I wore a studded tank top and dumped a bottle of water over my head while I talked about objectification in pop music. (The script for this was lost in a flood. Too bad! I’m sure it totally held up!)
After college, I completed the writing program at the Second City Training Center, where I met my writing partner John. Through our twenties, we wrote, produced, and directed several sketch comedy shows, many of which were staged in the midnight spot at Donny’s Skybox, a great time slot if you want to attract drunk audience goers and one very lost, confused group of kids on their prom night. We got into Chicago Sketchfest twice, which was exciting! This was a really fun, productive creative period and I accumulated an entire box of wigs. During this time I applied for a Writers Table workshop at the Second City. After my interview and writing sample, I was selected with four other training center grads for a project in which we worked with Second City faculty to develop two pilot scripts. I learned a TON about television writing and drove the rest of the group bonkers each time I had to convert their Final Draft formatting to AppleWorks for my edit rounds (Sorry guys! I was the worst!). The scripts went on to receive coverage from William Morris, which was a gigantic opportunity for a young dumb newb like me who couldn’t afford to buy Final Draft for her turquoise iMac.
In my late twenties, I took a three-year break from writing when I got into playing roller derby, as one does. Roller derby takes over your life, your free time, your laundry basket. I missed writing and producing shows, but I was also too exhausted from spending eight hours a week at practice to think about it. Life slowed down when I retired from the sport, and screeched to a halt when I had surgery to repair cartilage damage in my knee. While laid up on my couch in an immobilizer brace, laptop resting on my belly, I spotted a Facebook post from a former leaguemate, thee Juanna Rumbel, looking to start up a writing group. Without hesitation, I replied to her comment “I’m interested!” This is when Drinking with Writing Problems was born, a collective of stone-cold weirdos who wanted to make shit and have fun. For the many years that we were active as a group, I tried my hand at live lit, fiction writing, and blogging. I branched away from my roots in comedy, and it was freeing to not have the pressure to deliver a joke every few lines. I wrote a manuscript for a novel to see if I could do it. It wasn’t great, but I finished it and learned a ton in the process (like the fact that I am not a novelist).
For the last few years, I’ve been working on a collection of essays. They are about the ways that my life has been shaped by my family’s ancestral history and migration paths, landing us in this flat, frigid region scooted up by a freshwater lake, far from the the Pacific volcanic island chain from whence they came. I want to explore where and how my own story fits into the picture; I never learned Tagalog, but I am fluent in Simpsons quotes. This project is so precious to me, and I feel a weight of responsibility to do it right no matter how long it takes. Layering personal stories around a central theme, searching for the patterns and chronological anchors via a certain song or cultural moment, yes that’s my jam.
My writing journey has taken lots of side roads and double-backs (all of course on top of the wild weird course of my day job because something’s gotta cover the bills, but that’s a story for another post). There were a few moments I felt like I was on the brink of success and many, many more times when I couldn’t bring myself to open another lit mag rejection email. But I realized that what excited me the most about writing was the doing. I like to take something in my brain and figure out the shape I want to tell it in, whether it should be funny or sweet, jammed with facts or swirled with genre elements. These decades(!) of practice have been their own journey, which always felt just as vital to me as any final destination. What I love the most is that feeling when words start pouring out of your fingers, and you find yourself in almost a trance-like state, channeling something you can’t quite explain. And then the thing you know, you snap back to life in a smoky student lounge, or the divot of your couch, or a table in the corner of a bar, and look down to see you wrote a whole-ass thing.
A wise troubadour1 once sang “the years start coming and they don’t stop coming,” and I feel an increasing urgency to see and experience as much of the world as I possibly can. When I first started writing about travel, I followed the mold of what I see and read on the internet: destination guides, themed itineraries, packing/gear lists, etc. And then the aspirational world of Instagram and Tiktok travel influencers, beautiful young people somehow hitting multiple countries per year with the vaguest mention of how they fund their lifestyle or whether they have a day job. All that stuff gets clicks and is likely much more popular than rambling personal stories stuffed with nature descriptions. But since this is my Substack where I’m not beholden to an editorial team or publication style guide, I can do things my own way. I want to dive into the privilege of travel, which is something I don’t take for granted especially after the last several years. I want to include all the anxiety-inducing messy bits alongside the stunning views and life-affirming revelations.
Comedy writing is about exposing universal human truths that make us laugh in recognition. Fiction writing is about building inhabitable worlds that feel as lived-in as reality. Writing my essay collection is about following the line of my ancestors to where I am today. And writing about my travels, be it through physical spaces or through eras of my life, feels like a culmination of all of the above. It’s not about where I end up, but the process of getting there.
I want to extend a humungous thank you to my recent new subscribers! It means to world to have your readership and support.
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It was Smashmouth.
"I finished it and learned a ton in the process (like the fact that I am not a novelist)." I love this because it is true to the creative process. It's hard to understand where we fit in, but at some point, we do. Also RIP Steve Harwell, who would also agree with me on this by saying:
Didn't make sense not to live for fun
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb
So much to do, so much to see
So what's wrong with taking the backstreets?
You'll never know if you don't go (W-w-wacko)
You'll never shine if you don't glow!
GO KIM!
I love this whole thing, but I really loved this:
I never learned Tagalog, but I am fluent in Simpsons quotes. This project is so precious to me, and I feel a weight of responsibility to do it right no matter how long it takes. Layering personal stories around a central theme, searching for the patterns and chronological anchors via a certain song or cultural moment, yes that’s my jam.