It should be easy: to teach travel writing. After all, I had been teaching for more than a decade and had selected essays, Best American travel reportsa fairly well-respected book of essays on the Middle East, and even a New York Times Magazine Article about the time I walked from New York to New Orleans. I was in Yemen, had a favorite restaurant in Baghdad, and could tell you where to get the best North Korean food in Riyadh.

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But for the majority of my ten years at UCLA, I had taught outside my field – an essay course on Los Angeles, a creative writing course for medical students, and a general journalism course for English majors – and it felt strange to finally be preaching the genre I supposedly knew best. I was scared.

Sometimes you get what you want, and that’s harder than what you don’t want. Then protests broke out on my campus—in the same neighborhood where I taught travel writing—and suddenly the most interesting story was actually just 100 feet from the classroom. Would I be able to get students excited about the idea of ​​going anywhere? (I rarely went anywhere myself.) How would it feel to teach about travel if the best advice I could give was to go nowhere and stand up for something?

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I left Miami in 1997 to go to college in California. At 19, I hitchhiked to Alaska and worked on a fishing boat and then in a cannery. After that, I transferred to a college back east and almost immediately dropped out to work at a newspaper in Cambodia. There I met the woman I would marry and we moved to Indonesia and began working in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

In 2008, we moved to Saudi Arabia. We were two of the first American journalists to be based there. We had a child, and my wife was offered an exciting job – in Baghdad. This city of ten million was full of families. Instead, the child and I moved to Istanbul, and we all met in Kurdistan or Beirut, which soon became our home, just in time for some of the most dangerous and violent years of unrest in neighboring Syria.

During those years, my wife would put on her combat gear and sneak across the border while I changed diapers and wrote essays – about the trip to Sanaa with a small baby who caught rubella, probably from children in the Old City trying to share food. Or the time we rented a house on a Turkish island but my wife kept arguing with her editor and the seagulls wouldn’t stop screaming. Or a Christmas in Kurdistan with the most horrible and crazy Chinese food of my life. There were many protests.

What a strange time to be teaching! What was my role here? Nothing felt right. Predictably, students began writing essays about what had happened.

Then we moved to Los Angeles in 2013, and I tried to write more of what I guess you could call travel writing: about the bus ride to my book launch in Los Feliz and the walk along the South Bay bike path and a trip to Joshua Tree to reflect on the legacy of Edward Abbey. Gradually, my desire to write such essays dried up as my life became less mobile. Instead, I raised a child and learned to surf and got good at teaching classes that had little to do with the person I once was and the places I once called home. I wrote about opera for The Paris Review and about the education of The Los Angeles Times and I also reviewed a lot of books. I gradually became someone else, somewhere else.

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Suddenly it was spring 2024, and I found myself walking into a classroom in LA where I had taught classes for years, only this time I was carrying the brand new curriculum for a course I had written, designed, and created myself: English 131E: “Travel Writing.”

The plan was to read David Foster Wallace about the fair and the ship, but also Agnes Callard’s essay about why travel sucks. We wanted to think about how queer African-American writers like Bryan Washington, who is obsessed with Japan, might reframe the stories we tell and why and how Crying at H Mart was to help a new generation of young writers to look in the mirror and also to confront their experiences. You could just go to the supermarket and write a beautiful essay. I could just go into a room and try to teach students how to write about travel.

Then halfway through the course was over. Not bad! The students had written half a dozen short essays, a midterm exam, and they were preparing for a “field trip” to write a much longer essay. One student drove to the Central Valley to find a songwriting community about the immigrant experience. Another had hiked a mountain in Utah in hopes of escaping his ex-fiancée. A third wanted to take Ubers at night and chat with garrulous drivers.

That’s right: sometimes the best story is right in front of you.

Then something quite remarkable happened: A group of UCLA students (some of me) gathered in large numbers in the main square. As I passed by the camp on that fateful Tuesday afternoon, I had my bag with me – stuffed with stories of adventures all over the world – and when I passed a colleague, I could barely hear him over the hovering helicopters. I took one last look at the camp before heading home. Of course, I didn’t know how bad it would be that night, but I felt a sense of foreboding.

I stood there, dejected, listening to the murmur of teenagers and young people in their early twenties – not unlike the gatherings I had seen or known from my time in the Middle East – and my mind went dark, thinking of the concussion of an explosion, of bad guys with guns, of sirens blaring. It’s hard to care. It’s easy to get hurt.

Overnight, the worst things happened. Well, not the worst, but it was amazing to think that something so bad could happen right here on my own campus. (The California Highway Patrol recently confirmed that nearly 60 projectiles were fired into the crowd, including “33 beanbag rounds from 12-gauge shotguns and two dozen 40-millimeter ‘direct-impact’ rounds from pistols and shotguns,” it said in a report.)

That sad next day, and in the days that followed, UCLA administrators sent a panicked official memorandum to faculty after a heinous and preventable tragedy on their own campus. I monitored Twitter. I responded to emails from students, many of whom were devastated. Then I got concerned emails from friends far away. Finally, another message arrived from UCLA, this time telling us that all classes would be held online indefinitely.

What a strange time to be teaching! What was my role here? Nothing felt right. Predictably, students began writing essays about what had happened. Many of them were shrill and predictable. I struggled to explain how I could make a good story out of this gigantic event.

Then I got a good one. And as I read that essay, I noticed something new that might actually be something fundamental – something that I had even incorporated into my own curriculum, even if I had forgotten about it.

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The very good article began in Orange County, during a morning shopping trip with the student’s father, in the wake of the protests on campus and the arrests and violence. My student did not speak to her father, she wrote, because he was still angry that she had risked her life by joining the protest. She herself was angry at her father because he could not understand why she had joined, and so she refused to speak to him.

They marched angrily through the aisles of an empty grocery store in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, filling their shopping carts without understanding each other. What could possibly happen? As they laid their items on the counter at the checkout line, stone-faced, they were startled when an employee noticed the student’s college sweatshirt.

“You go to UCLA, huh? I’ve been hearing about the riots all week. You weren’t at those protests, were you?”

So much tension! The student writes that she looked at her father, then at her sweatshirt, and then back at the cashier. “No,” she says innocently, “I wasn’t there. But it’s all pretty scary.”

That wasn’t true. She had been there. It Was scary. But while all my other students tended to write at length about that horrific night, highlighting the days before and after to say as much, this student wrote barely anything about the suffocating feeling of being pushed, “white bodies to the front lines,” or the flying bricks, or the taste of the bear spray, or the police officers shooting guns at her face, or how truly scared she was. (I mean, she wrote about all of that, but with effective restraint.)

What strikes me is how she wrote about lying to the cashier, how she looked at her father who started laughing, and then how she wrote about how she started laughing herself.

On the way back to the car, she wrote, her life seemed to open up again.

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It’s been a few months now. I guess I knew part of me would enjoy standing in front of a group of 20-somethings and telling them the action takes place in a faraway place. I knew my curriculum was designed to complicate that idea. But I also knew I hadn’t done much traveling myself recently.

It is probably a good time to point out that this author I am so impressed with was not even in my travel class. She is a medical student taking the other The course I taught this spring is called “Medical Narratives” and is a kind of creative writing boot camp for future physicians.

That’s the way it is: Sometimes the best story is right in front of you. Sometimes it’s a future doctor with a light touch sitting there in a classroom you took for granted. I guess what I’m saying is that you can go to the grocery store, you can forgive your father, and no matter how hard or hopeless it seems, how much it hurts, you can make pretty much anything in your life great and beautiful and worthwhile.