Running a travel blog is serious business. While I do my best here to curate stories and photographs from travels around the world, sometimes my travels on the internet really lead me to stumble upon some truly marvelous travel blogs.
Take Nowhere Mag, for instance. Besides scoring a few points for evoking imagery of that Beatles song, Nowhere Mag is in a class all of it’s own. Besides the website itself being fluid and intuitive to users, the stark minimalism is like a breath of fresh air. It’s touts itself as a hub of travel stories, photography, and art. It has been praised by the likes of Fathom, Huffington Post, and The New York Times, and rightly so: the writing itself doesn’t necessarily focus on the travel experience of the adventurer, per se, nor does it suffer from the archaic exoticism that some travel writers keep in their employ. Instead, writers over at Nowhere Mag turn their eyes to the formative experience that travel can be. Honestly, it’s quite an introverted approach when compared to the recent wave of amateur travel bloggers. This is a simplification, I know, but if the average travel blogger follows the formula of “I went to a with (or without) b, saw c, and interacted with d. I (do or do not) recommend traveling to a because x.” If we’re lucky, sometimes we’ll be blessed with some insider tips on how to make the most of our time in a.
But Nowhere Mag takes a slightly different approach. If other travel blogs are predictably formulaic, as in the only variance between stories lies within those variables, then Nowhere Mag is organic. With just a quick scan of the front page, an article about James Baldwin caught my eye. Now it’s not a great unknown that Baldwin lived out much of his life, and eventually died in France. But how exactly this fit into the context of a travel blog piqued my interest. After all, Baldwin died in 1987, and this article is appearing 27 years later in 2014! But Allan Warren, the article’s author analyzes how Baldwin’s move contributed to his worldview and his writing. Furthermore, the article looks at the implications of the move in terms of the wider civil rights movement. It’s the perfect intersection of history and travel writing.
Of course, that’s only one example of an article. They also explore travel in a more literal sense, such as the travel of a seed being digested by a bird. This scope of creativity and it’s applicability to travel writing definitely makes Nowhere Mag a blog to follow.