Andrew McCarthy doesn't suggest "the 10 best whatevers" in his travel writing.
"I try and always tell a story and not sell a destination," McCarthy said.
If people try to sell McCarthy something, he's walking the other way, he added, but if they entice him and get him interested, he'll follow them everywhere.
McCarthy spoke during the sessions "The Transformative Power of Travel" and "The Art of Storytelling" at the Arkansas Governor's Conference on Tourism March 10 in Rogers. He is an editor-at-large at National Geographic Traveler and an award-winning travel writer who has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Travel+Leisure, National Geographic Adventure and Bon Appetit. The Society of American Travel Writers named him the 2010 Travel Journalist of the Year, and he wrote a memoir in 2012 called "The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down."
However, McCarthy may be best known for his acting career, appearing in films such as "Pretty in Pink," "Weekend at Bernie's," "Mannequin" and "St. Elmo's Fire." He noted to the audience he "absolutely loved working with Molly Ringwald," and they still stay in touch. He has also directed episodes of shows including "Orange Is the New Black," "Alpha House" and "Gossip Girl."
For McCarthy, travel writing "turned into this accidental, parallel second career," he said. In the early 1990s, he was inspired to walk across Spain after reading a book called "Off the Road: A Modern Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route Into Spain" by Jack Hitt. He was miserable trudging across Spain for the first part of the trip, having to stop for a while in Pamplona because his blisters were so bad, and while walking through a wheat field, he broke down sobbing and screaming, having a "full-blown tantrum." After it subsided, he picked up his pack and walking stick and trudged to the next town, he said. The next morning was different, though, he said, saying he felt very awake and like he was forgetting something. He had a realization that "what I didn't have and what I'd always had till that very moment was fear." Fear had been so present in his life that he was never aware of its existence until the moment of its first absence, he said.
He felt alive and like himself, which he said he felt once before when he was 15 in a school production of "Oliver!" for his first acting role.
"I skipped across the rest of Spain."
McCarthy believes fear stops people from traveling.
"I think it's something imperative, and I think it changes ourselves deeply, and it changes those around us. And it can ultimately change the world," McCarthy said.
Traveling alone is also something he believes everyone should do at least once.
"It's an education on who we are and what our place in the world is," he said.
After his walk across Spain, McCarthy spent 10 years traveling, taking a notebook to write about his experiences. He read travel articles and felt that they were not capturing the deeply personal, rich experience he was feeling but instead selling destinations.
He approached the editor at National Geographic Traveler and asked to write a travel article.
"He said, 'You're an actor, dude.' I was like, 'Yeah but I know how to travel, and I know how to tell a story. That's what I do for a living,'" McCarthy said.
McCarthy said the editor thought this was an interesting answer. After a year of badgering and emailing him, the editor gave him a chance. McCarthy, in return, said he'd forego pay if the story wasn't good enough. He went to Ireland and wrote a story, and then another and another. He said sometimes he has to know the story he's planning to write before getting on a plane, such as finding the perfect cup of tea in India, and other times an editor will just tell him to bring back a story from Tahiti.
He said underneath every story he writes on traveling is the following feeling: "This matters. This is important. It will change your life. It changed mine." He believes that passion is what really communicates to people, not whatever it is he's writing about. If someone reads a story he writes and gets off the couch to go somewhere they've never been, even if it's not to the place he was writing about, he said he's had a good day's work.
His first editor said to him "don't be a travel writer; you're a writer who's traveling," McCarthy recalled.
NAN Profiles on 03/16/2014