Thomas Kohnstamm caused a bit of controversy when his book Do travel writers go to hell came out. There was a lot of outrage over ‘desk updating’ of travel guides and Kohnstamm’s description of how travel books were written. An article even made the front page of the New Zealand Herald.
I’m sure that took its toll on him in an I’ll-never-work-again kind of way, but if there’s one quality that screams out from his work it’s that you can’t keep a good man down. Which is just as well – on the way to the airport to catch his plane to New Zealand his car was hit by a “large commercial truck”.
“The car looked pretty much like a cigarette butt,” he laughed, adding something to the effect that hindsight is a great rear view mirror.
Kohnstamm is irrepressible – he has seen some wild and crazy times. Cue predictable comparison to Hunter S. Thompson for his drug-dealing attempts and other, ah, sexploits, but the salutory lesson from reading Kohnstamm is that every choice has its price.
And the price of his travel writing workshop today was a bargain for those that attended. The place was packed – and audiences have been wall-to-wall this weekend – and the book signing queue took about 20minutes to die down. If there are more writers as honest and courageous as Kohnstamm I think the travelling pu blic is better off.
He is now looking forward to the Sydney festival and planning a book about “the joys of illegitimate fatherhood”.
