Curiosity, Reinvention, And Inspiration: The Return Of Books and Travel

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Welcome back to the Books and Travel Podcast! In this episode, I explore why I’m restarting the show, how travel has shaped my writing, and the deeper reasons we journey—both physically and through books.

From revisiting my first episode to discussing reinvention, curiosity, and the meaning of travel, this is a fresh start filled with inspiration for readers, writers, and adventurers alike.

Why I’m restarting the podcast – Revisiting my first episode on The Three Trips That Changed My Life and the theme of reinvention.
Turning 50 and creative confidence – How my journey as a writer led to this fresh start.
Books that came from the podcast – Pilgrimage (travel memoir) & Writing the Shadow (creativity & darkness).
The ocean metaphor – Light & dark sides of travel, inspired by The Three Trips That Changed My Life.
The meaning of travel – Emily Thomas on experiencing otherness.
Curiosity – Steve Brock on using travel as a learning lab.
Finding beauty close to home – Brianna Madia on redefining what travel means.
Travel inspiring fiction – Layton Green on researching thrillers through travel.
How place shapes storytelling – Roz Morris on writing from past experiences.
Gothic travel, cemeteries, and memento mori – Loren Rhoads on being “life-obsessed” rather than death-obsessed.
What’s coming next for the show

You can find my books at JFPennBooks.com and see more of my photos on Instagram @jfpennauthor

Curiosity, Reinvention, and Inspiration: The Return of Books and Travel

Hello travelers, I’m Jo Frances Penn and yes, the podcast is back!

I’ve missed talking to other writers about travel and the places that inspire us and many of you have told me that you enjoy the show — so I’m excited to be back, and I already have lots of new guests lined up for interviews about fascinating places as well as the deeper side of travel, and of course, book recommendations!

As this is the first episode for a while, I’m doing a solo episode with some clips from other guests where I’ll go through why I originally started this podcast and why I’m now restarting the show, thoughts on why we travel, reinvention, curiosity, different perspectives on places, especially when we are outsiders, as well as finding beauty closer to home, and of course, memento mori.

I would love to know your thoughts on the show, or about a particular episode, and I would love to see photos of where you’re listening. Right, let’s get into it.

Six years ago, in February 2019, I released the first episode of this podcast in a solo show entitled Lake Malawi, Jerusalem, and Blue Water Sailing to Vanuatu. The Three Trips That Changed My Life — and I’m going to play the opening clip as it relates to why I am restarting the show again now.

“This show is all about reinvention, which is also part of what travel means to me.

When I think about what I want to do with my life for the next 10 years — I like to think about the 10 year span because if we commit to doing things for 10 years, amazing stuff happens that we may never have expected.

So when I think about my life, the main thing that stays the same is books and travel. These are the things I come back to again and again. The things I truly, truly love.

I’m also fascinated by the inner and outer journeys that both books and travel can bring — a change in perspective, an empathy. Perhaps an entirely new direction in your life because of something you’ve read or somewhere you’ve been or something you’ve experienced. If you know what I mean, then I hope that you are going to enjoy this podcast.

I’m also going to write two books from this material over time. I have been thinking about a travel memoir for many years, and also I’ve talked about what is a working title, The Shadow Book, which is very much about creating from the dark side of ourselves.

I’ve wanted to write these books for many years. They’ve been bubbling away, and yet I have not made time for those to emerge. So partly this podcast is me giving time to these books. I don’t know what the memoir is or what the Shadow book is at the moment, but I know that by creating this material this way, I will be able to tap into things that I have not tapped into before, and that in itself is quite exciting.

I’m also a little scared because it will mean being very transparent, being open about things I haven’t shared necessarily before. I might have written about in a fictionalised way, but you might never know what’s true and what’s not true. So I will be talking about those things on this show over time.”

Click here to listen or read the whole episode with pictures

It’s fascinating to revisit that first episode now because I feel like —

Reinvention is at the heart of why I’ve started the show again.

As this goes out, I am about to turn 50. I’ve been a professional full-time author since 2011, I’ve written almost fifty books and short stories across multiple genres as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn, and I finally feel like I have the creative confidence to step in a new direction.

The two books I mentioned that I wanted to write in that clip are now out in the world. Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways is my midlife travel memoir, written mostly over the pandemic years when I did multi-day walks that kept me sane and helped me find my way again in difficult times.

It was also my first Kickstarter campaign and my first beautiful hardback book with color photos of my travels. You can find several episodes about pilgrimage in the backlist including my thoughts from the Camino de Santiago and an excerpt from the audiobook, which I narrated.

My Shadow book came soon after, the full title is Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words — as by writing the memoir, I was able to tap into the more personal side of my writing.

That process released a lot of blocks for me, so if you’re writing a memoir, then I hope you persist, as it’s one of the hardest and also one of the most rewarding genres to write.

Both of those books scared me in the writing process, and both of them contain vulnerabilities I haven’t shared anywhere else — they changed my writing, taking it into deeper waters, which is part of my aim with conversations in this show.

Which brings me back to the metaphor of the ocean which I use on the podcast logo and which characterises the content of the podcast and also the articles I post on BooksAndTravel.page. Here’s another snippet from that first episode which expands on this, From Lake Malawi, Jerusalem, and Blue Water Sailing to Vanuatu. The Three Trips That Changed My Life.

“I have a metaphor, which is the ocean, and the ocean is going to definitely come into many of these episodes —

But I want to do two aspects in this show.

First of all, the dappled light of turquoise shallows, and I want you to picture that in your mind. You are safe. You are maybe just paddling. You’ve got your feet in, you’re in the sun, you’ve got a cocktail in your hand or a fruit juice or whatever you like to drink, and sparkling water, wine. You are enjoying the simple joys of a new place.

And so I will be talking about my travels and also interviewing authors around the places that inspire our writing, and we will talk about food and drink and the lighter side of travel, which, will help you explore.

We’ll also be looking at what books you might like to read about places, so that will be the lighter side of travel, but I also want to explore what I’m calling the dark midnight depths, and that to me is —

That edge of challenge and a pull to the deep, and some mystery, and the things that are a little bit darker around travel.

It’s not all sweetness and light. It’s not all cocktails and tapas. We go to travel and we go to books for that challenge, for a change, for deeper meaning.

So I want to explore, perhaps what is the most important exploration of all, which is the inner transformation, the inner journey.”

***

So why do we travel, whether it’s in person or in our minds through books and listening to people on podcasts like this, and in movies and films and photos and social media?

In an interview on the meaning of travel, philosopher Emily Thomas gave her thoughts:

“For me, traveling is all about experiencing otherness.

It’s all about going to places that are new and unfamiliar and trying to figure out how to make sense of them, how to map them onto the world that you do know.

My best travel experiences have actually been ones where I have gone to some place where I haven’t understood anything around me, not the language, not what’s going on in the street, not the social cues, and I have very slowly, by reading and talking to people, let it come to put the pieces together and come to understand the place.”

***

One of reasons I travel is curiosity.

It certainly drives me in terms of research around the books I want to write and the stories I want to tell. So much so that I want to write a book on curiosity at some point, so I hope that will spill out of this show in some way, as Pilgrimage and the Shadow book did last time.

In an interview on Curiosity, Wonder, and Serendipity, I talked to Steve Brock about Hidden Travel, and I asked him how can people tap into their curiosity?

“Well, it starts with knowing what it is that you actually love, and believe it or not, most human beings don’t know what it is that they really deeply, truly love. We are so keyed into distractions that we don’t really know what our deep passions are.

One of the ways to do that is to think of a trip as a learning laboratory, so you have this opportunity to explore your interest.

I talked to one person who has a friend she loves rollercoasters, and so she plans all of her trips around amusement parks around the world. And you think, okay, well that’s a nice little hobby. But the fun thing about that is that she has connected now with this entire community of rollercoaster aficionados, and she has found her tribe, if you will.

And so part of it has led to not just new places and destinations, but that curiosity has grown into relationships that she really treasures, and she has some great friends as a result of that.

One thing I think it’s important for people to remember is that curiosity is not the same for everybody, nor is any single person curious about everything. I may be curious about, for example, history type of things, as you are, you’re curious about cemeteries.

Know what it is that you’re curious about.

Use your trip as a way to explore that curiosity because it gives you the freedom to practice things you would not do at home.

I may take a cooking class on a trip that I would never take at home, or I may explore a new type of physical activity like kayaking on a trip that I just wouldn’t do at home.

Use the freedom that you have there from the routine to not only spark that curiosity, but to pursue that curiosity.”

***

I certainly pursue my curiosity for the seeds of my stories and all my books as J.F. Penn have been inspired by my travels or places I’ve read about.

My ARKANE thrillers are truly international in scope from the burning ghats of Varanasi, India in the first scene in my first thriller, Stone of Fire, to Vienna, Nuremberg and Washington DC in Spear of Destiny, the most recent adventure.

My Mapwalker fantasy adventures were inspired by an antique map shop here in my city of Bath when I wondered what might happen if I could walk through the ancient map into a world off the edge of our own — might I find the places written off our maps somehow, and the people and the creatures that end up there?

My Brooke & Daniel crime thrillers are based in modern day London and resonate with the history of the city.

My standalone stories are all over the shop — from Death Valley set in California, to Seahenge on the Norfolk coast, to New Zealand for Risen Gods, and the biodynamic vineyards of Somerset for Blood Vintage.

Everywhere I go I find places and people and artifacts and myths that spark story, and part of this show is about talking to authors who also experience the same thing.

In Catnip for a Novelist, I talked to thriller and fantasy author Layton Green about how he uses his travels in book research.

I love talking to Layton as his Dominic Grey thrillers are similar to my ARKANE stories, and we’ve written about some of the same places, even though we are very different people.

“I will plan my books around where I want to travel, but of course if the narrative takes me elsewhere, I’ll follow the narrative. But usually they intertwine really closely and you can always work a place into the plot that you haven’t been before that you want to go.

But a lot of my novels, as I’m getting into the plot and writing the story, things will come up or places will come up that I want to visit and I’ll just decide, okay, it’s on. That’s gonna be where I’m going and that’s part of the story.

I’ve found that for me the best way is to take notes. As I travel, I take some pictures, but I never look at them for writing. I will take my little Moleskine notebook and my pen and definitely the best part of my job is, I’ll just go to a place and I’ll walk around and I’ll record my thoughts and impressions, and that I have found leads to my best writing.

I think a hallmark of my writing is that I try to stay as true as possible, especially when it comes to setting. And the only caveat to that is the old parable of the blind men touching an elephant, where they’ll each touch a different part of the elephant, so they’ll come away with a vastly different conception of what an elephant is. I think it’s a little bit like that with travel.

Take Zimbabwe for example. I’ve been very pleased to know that people from Zimbabwe have liked my book and the descriptions of it. But it’s probably written more for people that have not been to Zimbabwe or have only been a little bit. I’ve had plenty of books where I’ve had locals tell me that isn’t how this place is, and I’m thinking, actually it is.

It was just my perception of it.

“What I wrote about was true in its own way.”

***

I love that phrase — “what I wrote about was true in its own way.”

This applies to both fiction and memoir and anything that is fixed in time, because everything changes and we change, too. That’s part of why I love these conversations, because everyone has a different perspective and we get to dip in and just for a little while, try to experience something in a different way.

In a conversation with literary fiction author Roz Morris about Travels without Sense of Direction, she talks about how she didn’t even know how much place affected her stories until writing her memoir.

“I hadn’t realized how much actually until I wrote Not Quite Lost because I went back through a diary that I’d kept and —

I found the seeds of my novels in that diary from travels I’d done 20 years before —

I actually wrote the novels and I hadn’t realized how far those experiences and, and the impressions they’d given me. I hadn’t realized how far they’d stayed with me and so that’s quite a revelation.

I found that my novel Life Form Three, which is set in an unspecified time in the future. All the countryside has gone except there is one country estate that’s been preserved because it belonged to somebody and it has trees and valleys and hills and a ruined house in a wood, and there’s nowhere else left like that in the entire country. And that came from the travels I’d written about in that diary and had forgotten about, so environment really inspires me.

When you’re with horses, they make you very aware of the environment. I noticed the different colors of grass changing all the time and leaf buds and things like that. And a horse makes you very aware of it because a horse experiences the environment in a very different way. It can hear things you don’t even know are there. It notices smells and sounds that you don’t know are there. It makes you very aware of your environment.

And I thought one day as I was riding on an old path and I thought under this path are probably the footprints of other people and other people on horses maybe. And it just made me feel there was a huge story about buried things and things that had gone and it was the horse that made me realize that we have this connection to nature. And then I thought, what if you wrote about a place where all that had nearly gone, and horses are like a conduit back to it.”

***

I love that Roz talks there about being on a horse as a different way to experience a place. I’m allergic to horses, so I am never going to write from that perspective, but it’s good to consider how you can have an experience of travel without having to cross the world to some far off place.

You can always see places near you with new eyes, which we all learned about in the pandemic when we couldn’t go so far.

In an interview with Brianna Madia we talked about The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life and she talked about —

Finding beautiful places close to home and looking at things in a new way.

“I think that we get comfortable, and especially now with social media, we look online and we think that travel has to be a week holiday in a tropical place, or you have to be taking a selfie on an airplane in order to be traveling.

And there were so many beautiful places that I could have easily gotten to over the weekend, back back in Connecticut. And I’m embarrassed at how little I explored where I actually grew up. And I think a lot of people feel that way. You just tend to fall into this routine of like, oh, I’ve probably seen it all.

I think that that’s another reason that I’ve fallen so in love with the desert is I just know it’s such a classic example of a landscape where it’s impossible to have seen it all. You can always look and find something new and I wish I had applied that thinking to the place that I grew up because I believe there’s beautiful things everywhere.”

***

We all find different things beautiful, and —

One of my endless fascinations is with aspects of gothic and death culture

— gothic architecture, graveyards, ossuaries, crypts, dark travel, ruins. I am basically like Wednesday from The Addams Family, except I don’t dress that way. I’m a vanilla goth.

But while some people think these interests are morbid, others see memento mori — remember you will die — as a way to live harder, to live more in the present, and to make the most of every day.

In my interview with Loren Rhoads about cemeteries and graveyards, we discussed being Life Obsessed, and talked about our favourite places to visit —

“I don’t think it’s morbid at all. Somebody will accuse me of being death obsessed and for me, it’s the opposite. I am life obsessed. I know we’ve just got a certain number of days, so why wouldn’t you spend it out in the sunshine? Listening to birdsong and looking at beautiful art. What have you got to do with your life that’s better than that?

I don’t know. I just don’t see cemeteries as morbid at all. I think it’s beautiful that we remember people. There are all these amazing stories in the cemetery that you can learn with a tour guide is the best way. But even just walking around and looking at the stones and reading the lovely old names and trying to make guesses about the iconography and their days of birth and death. It’s a way of connecting with the past that looking at architecture doesn’t do for me. Don’t let a day pass because you have a gift to bring to the world.”

***

I love that attitude of being life-obsessed, and part of what I love about life is traveling and reading, which brings me back to why I am rebooting this show, and why I already have interviews planned with different guests and also some solo episodes coming too.

I’m planning to release a new episode every second week, and you can also have a listen to the backlist. There are 92 episodes, most interviews around a book or a place or a mode of travel, or a philosophy, and others are solo shows where I talk about places I’ve lived and the places that have inspired my books.

Every episode is evergreen so you can listen at any time, there’s nothing time-sensitive. I hope that you can escape virtually and enjoy traveling away even in your mind, and of course, there are book recommendations in every episode. There’s a transcript and photos and links for each episode all linked at BooksAndTravel.page/listen

You can find my books and short stories at JFPennBooks.com and also on the usual stores. I also narrate some of my stories now, and most are available in audio format on all the major platforms.

I’d love to hear what you think about the show, as well as any questions or book recommendations or ideas for future episodes, and send me pictures of where you’re listening and you can also follow me on Instagram @jfpennauthor.

Happy travels — and I’ll see you next time!