Travel Talk is a new Sosauce blog series in which we chat with our favorite travel experts about celebrating the saucy side of travel. With such successful experiences in travel media, we want to highlight their journeys from turning a passion for wanderlust into a profession, their travel plans for 2010, and how they document and share their own travel experiences.

Read our previous traveler spotlights on the Sosauce blog here.

Eva Holland snowmobiling in Whitehorse, YT – Canada

This week we interviewed Eva Holland, Senior Editor at World Hum, a site dedicated to sharing the best travel stories online. Aside from reading and writing travel articles, Eva is a big history buff and is currently exploring the Great White North. I got to chat with her about her sauciest travel experiences, what travel stories inspire her at World Hum, and what’s in store for her this year.

How is Vancouver treating you? Can you tell us a bit about your trip?
Vancouver’s been exhausting, but really fantastic. I’d been thinking for a few years now that I’d like to make it out here for the 2010 Winter Games, and my trip to Beijing for the 2008 Summer Games really cemented that goal – there’s something pretty powerful about spending time in an Olympic host city. I only made it to one official event – Slovakia vs. China in women’s hockey – but just mingling with the crowds on the streets here has meant some of the best people-watching I’ve enjoyed in years.

Interested in traveling to Vancouver yourself before winter ends? Visit the Sosauce Guide for fun points of interests to book your next holiday vacation in Vancouver.

What other travel plans do you have in 2010? Are there any trips you are looking forward to most?
I’m really, really excited about seeing more of Canada’s northern territories this year. I just moved to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, and I plan on using it as a base for my arctic explorations. I have a road trip along the Dempster Highway, the only Canadian road to cross the Arctic Circle, planned for mid-March – I’m doing it in winter so I can drive the ice road that extends the highway all the way to the shore of the Arctic Ocean. I’m also hoping to get to Nunavut in the summer.

If you’re planning to travel soon, be sure to log your itinerary with Sosauce Trip! Record your trip on an interactive map, pin destinations and points of interest, plus add in photos, videos, tips, and reviews.

With a background in Historical Studies, when and how did you translate those interests into traveling as a new career?
It’s always been hard for me to separate my interests in history and travel – they’re two tightly interconnected expressions of my interest in the world around me, if that makes sense. I travel in part because I’m interested in the history of the places I visit, and I study history because I want to learn more about the places I’ve been and the places I want to go. So it actually feels like a pretty seamless transition to me. When I planned on a career in academics, my goal was to research and write interesting stories about the past in the places that interest me, and what I do now doesn’t feel all that different – though this way, I do get to venture out of the library a lot more often!

How did you become a travel writer? Any tips for aspiring travel writers?
I had my first newspaper story published while I was attending graduate school in England – 500 words about a “Trainspotting” themed walking tour in Edinburgh, in my hometown paper, the Ottawa Citizen. Not long after that, I decided against doing a PhD after all, and instead planned to head home to Canada and give freelance writing a real shot. That was in mid-2006 – I came home in January of ’07 and spent the next seven or eight months reading and writing and pitching non-stop. In August I attended the Book Passage travel writing conference in San Francisco, and by the fall I was blogging for World Hum and Vagablogging, and contributing regularly to Matador Travel. Six months of hard work after that, I was able to quit my day job as an archival researcher and start getting by on writing alone.

Tips? Be ready to work, and work hard. Beyond that, I think there are two different genres of advice – tips for writing, and tips for selling.

On the writing front, I think the best strategy is to write, as much as you can, and then read and re-read your work with a critical eye. Editing sessions with like-minded friends have worked well for me over the years, too. Read everything – travel writing, memoir, fiction, poetry – you can get your hands on. One of the first things I did when I came home from grad school was check all the “Best American Travel Writing” anthologies out of the library and go through them all, making notes on the stories and writers I liked best, then reading up on those writers and learning where else they’d published, then finding and reading those publications for more similar writing… and so on.

As for selling, I think it’s really important to target your pitches well – do your homework, get to know the publications you want to pitch and give your idea a hard look. Does it fit the criteria set out in the guidelines? How does it look in comparison to the stories published recently in that section? Has the topic already been covered? There’s a lot of very un-sexy nuts and bolts type work involved in pitching and submitting, and I think it’s important that new writers learn to jump through those hoops.

Sosauce is currently looking for travel writers to contribute here on the Travel Geek blog. This is a great chance to get your foot in the door – submit your travel pieces here.

As Senior Editor at World Hum, what do you believe drives travelers to the site? How do you see World Hum’s role in the travel industry?
I think people keep coming back to World Hum, above all, for the writing. In this super-saturated travel media industry, it’s never been easier to read about the wild adventures people are undertaking all over the globe – but I think a large part of what draws people to our site is the craft that our writers put into telling their stories.

What have been the most popular stories on World Hum in your experience?
The most popular stories are often the ones that make a strong, well-articulated statement – opinion pieces like Sophia Dembling’s “Confessions of an Introverted Traveler.” Pieces about travel writing often do really well, too – there are a lot of aspiring writers out there.

How is it working alongside the Travel Channel network?
It seems like a successful relationship from what I’ve seen, and probably a good example of the ways in which old and new media can work together and support each other going forward.

You’ve had the privilege to call a few cities home. What has been your favorite destination to live in thus far? Any places you would want to live in next?
That’s a tough one. Right now I’m still in the honeymoon phase in Whitehorse – I’ve been there for just over three months and am absolutely loving life in the Yukon (and it’ll only get better when summer comes!), so I’m tempted to call my latest home my favorite. The three months I spent living in Queens last year were really memorable as well – I’d always wanted to find a way to live in New York City and it was very satisfying to make that happen, even if only briefly.

Where would I want to go next? I still toy with the idea of getting a working holiday visa for New Zealand, or maybe heading back to the UK – I have a couple of years of eligibility left for those programs. And I’ve never been an expat in a non-English speaking country, so I’ve considered that, too. We’ll see.

What is it about travel writing that inspires you to recreate and share your travel experiences?
I’d be happy writing about nearly anything – history, sports, arts and culture, current affairs…I love traveling, so it’s logical for me to write about it, but my goal setting out was to make a living from writing, and the subject matter was almost secondary, in a way.



Thanks to Eva for chatting with Sosauce for this week’s edition of Travel Talk. Stay connected with Eva on Twitter and be sure to read travel stories from around the world at World Hum.

Sosauce wants to be your home for recreating and sharing travel experiences. If you are interested in becoming a community member or contributing blogger, please email us for more information.

Read more posts by Alisha

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 5:30 PM and is filed under Spotlight, Traveler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.