Five Questions With...travel writer Jamie Phillips
(Above: Jamie Phillips at work on her new book, to be published July 2019)
Who is Jamie Phillips?
I’m Canadian and, according to the people who make fun of me for being cold all the time, a bad one. A lot of my favourite things are also the most basic of Tinder bio tropes: travelling, yoga, coffee, sushi, Netflix binges and looking at pictures of dogs on the internet. I studied psychology in University and am still fascinated by all the idiosyncrasies of the human condition, only instead of making lots of money as a shrink, I write about real life experiences just for fun. I spend a lot of time thinking about bees and feminism and the inevitable robot uprising.
Tell us about your book!
My book is a collection of true travel stories spanning ten years and six continents. I think the most interesting and entertaining travel stories are the ones where something goes wrong or plans go off the rails or something really weird happens. Anything that makes a trip more difficult or uncomfortable or absurd is usually a great story afterwards, in hindsight. So, this book centres around the best worst things that have happened to me on the road, like: the time I got into a fight with a donkey in the middle of the night in the Kyrgyz mountains; living on an Australian farm in a house full of bees; failing at hitchhiking in Chile, getting lost inside a cave in Lao; an almost terminally boring bird watching tour in India, and lots more.
What prompted you to write it?
Writing a book has been on my to-do list for a really long time – I told my kindergarten teacher that I wanted to be an author when I grew up. And I wrote about travel because it was easier than coming up with fictional stories. Travel is a such a great subject because it puts you into these bizarre and incredible and hilarious situations; it basically writes itself. I also gravitate towards weird situations so that I can tell stories about them and, hopefully, entertain people and make them feel good about their own life choices.
(Above: Machu Picchu, Peru)
Choose three words to describe your writing process.
Idea! Distractions. Fussiness.
What next?
I’d like to change it up and write about something other than travel – maybe even something fictional! I’m really into horror stories and speculative fiction and dystopias, although real life is pretty saturated with dystopian horror shows right now so I don’t know if I want to depress myself any more than necessary. I’m also interested in the practicalities of ageing – about assisted living and long term care facilities, how the medical system works or doesn’t work for the elderly, what’s going to happen when all the Baby Boomers need care homes and whether there’s different and/or better ways to take care of our old people. So, we’ll see. Maybe it’ll be a horror story set in an old folk’s home.
To read more visit Jamie’s travel blog HERE
Follow Garreteer Press on Twitter HERE