Welcome to Gypsy Wednesday! Every Wednesday, I strive to highlight all the juicy morsels related to travel and beyond.
What is currency? Cold hard cash, plata, yen, euros. Certainly, it’s all of these. In the context of traveling, that word can signify a monetary transaction between hostel owner, tout and backpacker.
In Zoe Zolbrod’s first novel, Currency money equates to a sexual balance of power between main characters, Piv and Robin – a Thai man earning a wage from the foreign dwellers of Khao San Road, and a roaming American backpacker running out of funds and time. The unlikely pair join in a physical and financial union mired in a downward spiral of reluctant love and illegal smuggling. Against the sweltering backdrop of Thailand, Currency quenches a reader’s thirst for suspense, adventure – even complicated cross-cultural romance. As a traveler, aren’t these aspects what we sign up for?
I had the opportunity to pin down Zoe on the writing process, Currency’s roots, and why you should read her book.
Q: How did the idea for Currency germinate?
A: In the 90s, I went on a solo backpacking trip to Southeast Asia, and it blew my mind. You know how it is when you’re in the serious travel zone: every day, every image, was seared into my brain for eternity. Thailand was my base, and I had a friend living in Bangkok. She showed me the city in a way I could have never managed on my own as a tourist. Also, I had short but intense relationships with several Thai guys. At the end of my trip, a credit card snafu left me without access to funds. I was hanging out with a Thai man, and to say he helped me out would be an understatement. So, broke in Bangkok with a cute Thai guy. The people and events in Currency are entirely made-up, but that was the germ for the story.
Q: What came first, writing or travel?
A: Well, I wrote my first novel when I was about ten, but I spent a lot of my early adulthood telling myself I didn’t want to be a writer. It was only after my big trip that I started getting serious about writing–joining a workshop, trying to write every day, eventually going to grad school and keeping up with it after that. So writing came first, but traveling brought me back to it.
Q: How does travel factor into your philosophy?
Zoe, the authoress
A: When I travel, I’m more fully present in the moment, I live through all my senses, and I’m more open to the world. Traveling helps me take the focus outside of myself, and in the process, it helps me know myself in a different way. Those are all things I aspire to in everyday life, but they can be harder to achieve.
Q: Whether one is a journalist, travel writer or fiction writer, there’s always a process – what is your creative process to eek out the words?
A: I have to spend some time in my head first, mulling things over. Then I let the words come out in any old quick sloppy way they do—unfinished sentences, jumping around, whatever. Usually I draft on the computer, but sometimes I write in a notebook at the very beginning. Then I go back and forth between smoothing out what I have and adding more really rough stuff, and I go over it and over it like that until it’s all smooth in my mind. Then I ask for feedback from someone before I go at it again.
Q: What do you hope people will glean from Currency?
A: I hope it will entertain people, and that it will give them some of that travel feeling—like they’re wide-eyed, like they’ve escaped from the everyday routine. More ambitiously, I hope it will help people realize that they’re part of a larger pattern—economically, ecologically, historically. And that there is always another perspective on things, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t abandon the search for what’s right. That morality might be more complicated than it can appear, but it can exist.
Q: Finally, how do you plan on incorporating travel and writing into your life again?
A: Well, I hope that next year, when I’m not traveling around for the book, my family can take a trip together outside the country. If we can’t get to Costa Rica for a longer trip, then I hope we can at least get a week in Mexico. Writing-wise, I’m going to aim for one full day a month, by hook or by crook, along with scraps where I can find them. That doesn’t sound like much, but for me right now, it’s a lot. But so much of my life is spent parsing vacation days and plotting to steal hours. In the bigger picture, I’d like to keep working on being a traveler in my own land, so to speak, to be able to tap into that sense of wonder and adventure and risk more often in my day-to-day, no matter how constrained by circumstances I feel.
Contest Giveaway Details!!
Be one of the lucky few to receive a freshly pressed copy of Zoe Zolbrod’s enticing first novel, Currency.
Tell me about a time you got into a financial scrape on the road, or tell what you did to earn money to keep on traveling. Write your tale of woe in the comments section and ensure you provide a valid email or website address.
The Rules
- 3 winners will emerge – judging will be based on severity and the inventive manner in which you bailed out of the scrape.
- Contestants are people about to travel the world or currently are at a fairly fixed address.
- Zoe requests that when the receivers are done with the book, they leave it where another traveler is likely to find it–maybe they hand it off directly, or maybe they leave it in a hostel or hotel library, at a cafe, or at a traveler’s bookstore, where it could even be sold or exchanged. A sticker will be placed inside each book explaining the plan and asking whoever received it to comment at zoezolbrod.com telling where they got it and/or where they left it. We hope readers keep passing the book on.
- Contest winners will be formally announced on June 1, 2010.
Participate in this unique contest! Not only will you explore the globe, so will the book. To whet your palate more, check out a book review of Currency at Local Lit.
About Zoe Zolbrod:
Zoe Zolbrod was raised in Meadville, PA, graduated from Oberlin College, and received her MA from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Program for Writers. After backpacking around Southeast Asia, she co-edited the zine Maxine and worked as an editor. She lives in Evanston, IL, with her husband, the photographer Mark DeBernardi, and their two children.
Photos: Zoe Zolbrod and FriskoDude
Popularity: 6% [?]
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
So as it turns out, I cannot enter this contest, since I don’t have any tales of financial woe to tell. I really only travel when I have the money for the trip, and I’ve been lucky not to have been robbed or anything while traveling. Great contest, though.
Joanna, when I was in Vietnam in the early 90s, they had that same aversion to worn American dollars, and at that time, the country was still pretty closed and you couldn’t use credit cards. You pretty much had to bring in enough cash to last your visit. I knew a couple who had a few 100$ bills that they couldn’t get anyone to change, and they were pretty screwed, budget-wise. The ironic thing was, the Vietnamese bills, dong, were often so worn you could barely touch them without them falling apart. But we all survived! Thanks for writing.
My story isn’t so much of a financial scrape as it was a hard lesson learned. It turns out that in Peru, they only like “unbroken” money, so we couldn’t exchange any American money that was bent, torn or even slightly worn. That meant we had to find an ATM, take out money (and therefore be charged a fee), then, after exchanging that cash for soles, we were still carrying around all this American money with us. I suppose we weren’t really in any danger of being robbed though, seeing as how our broken money didn’t seem to be worth anything anyway!
I was robbed in Vietnam just after getting off the bus from Cambodia and I stupidly had everything I owned in my bag. Luckily I was traveling with my boyfriend of the time and he paid for the trip.
It was an interesting experience though because prior to the robbery I had been the dominant personality as I had more travel experience but once I depended on him for money it became an equal partnership.
The day after I arrived in Buenos Aires, I had scheduled to meet with the landlord of my new appartment. The payment and depositum for the appartment had to be paid upfront in cash. My original plan to take out US dollars on my connection in Paris had off course failed because the gate between my arrival and departure terminal was closed due to terror suspicion, so I had to walk almost 1 hour around the airport to barely make my flight. I had still been able to cash out almost enough cash without exciding the ATM limit, and figure I would be fine with one more cash out when the landlord arrived.
My landlord, which spoke less english than I spoke spanish (which means he can count to about 9ish), and he was not at all pleased with my plan of another cash out. We ran down to the closest ATM and after paying the last bit of money, he had to hit the road again to make it to the airport in time for a flight(sounds suspicious right?)
Later that day I went back to the ATM to make a second withdrawal to buy some groceries. It was first then I noticed that my bankcard had been closed because of suspicious activites, referring to 6 maximum limit cash outs in South America, thousands of miles away from my real hometown. There I was, stranded my second day in Buenos Aires with about $4 dollars worth of argentinan pesos, cellphone that didn’t work, and 0 credit on skype. Since it was after closing time on a friday, I wouldn’t be able to call the bank until monday. I had no acquaintenses in the city, and I couldn’t really walk up to a stranger and ask him to lend me some money in the first couple of minutes either.
I ended up buying a 10 pack of noodles and tuna, and spent the rest on a beer in a local hostel the next day where I met some friendly backpackers who offered to help me out. Things usually turn out good when you are out backpacking. But next time I will definently bring a back-up mastercard.
{ 3 trackbacks }