a reputation as a “travel writer” thanks primarily to two of his

nonfiction works, Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in

Central Asia and The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the

Legacy of Vietnam. But Bissell also helped engineer a renovation

of the travel genre. In the much-acclaimed Father of All Things,

Bissell takes a tour of Vietnam with his father, a Vietnam vet, and

delves as much into the characters forged from the Vietnam

experience—his own and his fathers—as into the locales he visits. By

refusing to affect an impossible objectivity, the book actually ends

up providing a much more textured “travelogue” that serves both to

bring a distant place and time to life and to generate a compelling

interpersonal narrative. In Chasing the Sea, Bissell catalogued the

death of the Aral Sea as a result of a multilateral imperialism. But

the power of the book comes from an Orwell-like frankness about the

cultures and lives he encounters; there are no murdered metaphors

meant to explain broad historical trends. Bissell is able to be a

“writer who travels” rather than a “travel writer”, and in so doing

invigorates a genre prone to cliché exhaustion. Bissell has written

for McSweeney’s as well as Harpers and is currently working in

Estonia.

intensely introspective. How does traveling, or unfamiliar locales and

crossed boundaries, impact your ability to look inward?

in, what’s important to me, and why I do what I do. Travel is the

constant experience of difference, which in turn leads deep,

introspective mental spelunking. When you’re home, you’re not

receiving nearly as many bits of incoming information. Actually, you

are, but you simply don’t notice as many because, chances are, you

have become inured to the reality you’re accustomed to. In a new

place, everything from car horns to doorknobs is fascinating. The

shape of public restroom urinals is one thing I always notice. Every

place has urinals, but no place has urinals that look alike. Another

interesting thing about travel: When you do come home, you start

noticing the weirdnesses of deeply familiar things. Redmond O’Hanlon

once said that he stops noticing things about new places after six

months. I would agree. Six months in, even the strangest people or

place begins to lose the shimmer of unfamiliarity. This is probably

why I’m a serial traveler. I’m all but addicted to newness.

and natural–as challenges that help you to see more clearly? I’m

interested in what compels your wanderlust in the context of your

objectives as a writer.

they’re connected in the sense that I write about travel often, but I

wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be a traveler. What

travel has done for me as a writer, I think, is given me access to

subject matter that I would not otherwise have had. I didn’t become

the writer I am until after I started to travel a lot. I probably

would have still been a writer–at least, I hope so–but I sometimes

wonder what kind of stuff I would have written about, or if it would

be as fun to write. Possibly it would be. This is just another

boundary, isn’t it? I think every boundary exists along a spectrum of

real and artificial, and they shift depending on context. I have what

is possibly a very romantic, naive view of writing as a

border-collapsing force, a thing that allows people the recognition of

what we all share–or at least the hope of what we all might share.

of the Soviet Union across some of your work. Is there a unique lesson

you think the peaceful–or “peaceful”–dissolution of a world

superpower has for people?

astounding stories of what so many people my age (34) went through

growing up. One friend’s father went to Siberia for what’s called a

“tenner” (ten years) for some mild anti-Soviet underground newspaper

work. Another friend’s father was a KGB agent who defected to the

West. When he was a little boy, he’d sell the Finnish garbage (Coke

bottles, plastic bags) that washed up along the shore of Estonia on

the streets of Tallinn and make as much in a day as most people earned

in six months. No kidding. And then, when these people were in high

school and college, the one single most overriding fact of their

existence disappeared. They were free. But with freedom came no small

amount of social derangement, which is milder in Estonia than a lot of

places, yes, but which still persists here. I’ve never been to a place

with as much simmering anti-Russian and pro-Russia sentiment. Estonia

actually had the lowest fluency-in-Russian rate of any Soviet

republic, and a horrifyingly small number of Russians speak Estonian

today (this is changing for the younger generations), which means this

place is about as divided as a functioning society can be. Totally

different from my experience in Uzbekistan, say, where independence

was greeted with much more fear and trembling. In my experience, the

more highly educated an ethnic Uzbek was, the likelier that person was

to live and function in Russian. Not so here. The more educated a

person is here, the less likely they are even to want to speak

Russian. There are all sorts of historic reasons for this disparity,

but it has suggested to me that the “peaceful” in “peaceful

dissolution” very definitely needs quotes around it. The experience

was just so different in every part of the Soviet Union and often

camouflaged all manner of psychic trauma. In terms of the people it

affected, you can’t really say anything definitive about the Soviet

collapse – which is itself a nice reminder of the inadequacy of

cookie-cutter ideas about “democracy” and “freedom.”

world. In Chasing the Sea you write about the travesty of the Aral Sea

and imperialism in Central Asia; given the impact Western nations have

on the rest of the world, are the stakes higher for journalists and

writers who tell stories of foreign places?

place, and then, in turn, misleading readers about that place, maybe

so. But when I really think about it, probably not. Writing on any

topic is perilous. You want to get it right no matter what you’re

writing about. And you almost never do, because there is always

someone who will complain that you’ve missed the point. My experience

with places, whether Vietnam or Estonia or New York City or my

hometown, is just that: my experience. I really try to shy away from

the grand statement when it comes to different cultures and nations. I

try to keep everything as solidly and honestly subjective as I can.

That’s all I think objectivity is: honest, self-questioning  subjectivity. And at the end of the day, a piece I write

about….Laos, for instance, even if it’s published in a place like Harper’s or The New Yorker, is not exactly going to set

the agenda, because I don’t write agenda-setting pieces; I write personal pieces. So the

“stakes” to me are always personal and literary ones, not political ones.

But, since the West has such a disproportionate ability to impact the

rest of the world do the stories journalists bring back from the rest

of the world have particularly higher stakes? Thomas Friedman famously

wrote about a destitute woman in Vietnam who was hustling money by

using a broken-down scale and offering to weigh you. He celebrated

this as a paean to globalization and the entrepreneurial spirit.

Oh, wow. I remember that Friedman bit, and further recall that I sat

there staring at the page, for several minutes, trying to figure out

if he was being satirical or not. Again, though, my journalism is, for

me, a personal account, not a brief, and so while I understand what

you’re getting at, and why you’re asking, the question doesn’t

resonate with me. It’s not part of my approach, or one of my concerns,

which I am fully willing to recognize might, in fact, be a weakness of

my approach.

put the peaceful in “peaceful dissolution” in quotes. Your articles

and books have been lauded for weaving a historical narrative with a

personal one (and a quasi-fictional one). The flatness of

international journalism gets us in the habit of defining anything

that isn’t outright war as “peaceful”–does the use of personal

stories and fictionalized retelling make your travel writing more

real, or less so?

so-called wider world are in many cases people who don’t care for the

more shall we say gossamer aspects of writing: pretty sentences,

lyricism, and so on. I’m not sure why this is. It probably has its

origins in the strong journalistic background most travel writers come

out of, in which the “story” is the focus and the writer’s personality

must fall in subordination to it. I haven’t had a journalism class in

my life. As I’ve said before, I really don’t know the first thing

about journalism (which some critics of my writing have been happy to

point out!). I became a journalist wholly by accident. So my bag of

tricks is a little bit different than the typical travel writer’s, I

would say. I’m also not particularly scandalized by the idea that

narrative nonfiction has all sorts of invention in it (which is not,

let me stress, the same thing as making shit up). I believe in a

fourth genre, as practiced by the likes of Paul Theroux and Robert Byron

and Ryszard Kapuscinski and Redmond O’Hanlon, in which nonfiction has the texture and

propulsive narrative qualities of fiction. Not only do I believe in

that genre, I’ve done my best to add to it in what ways I can. Two of

the best travel writers working are Eliza Griswold, who’s also a poet,

and Kira Salak, who I believe comes out of an academic background, and

their work has a very different flavor. A poet writing about the

developing world? A PhD in English literature canoeing an African

river? Their work flies in the face of so many preconceived notions of

“travel writing” and “journalism,” which is why I like it as much as I

do. I wish more travel writers wrote more beautifully, and I wish more

writers capable of beautiful prose left the house a little bit more.