by Judith Fein
After 12 years in the soul-sucking world of Hollywood screenwriting, Judie Fein found real nourishment on the road. You can, too.

The difference between a tourist and a traveler is that a traveler doesn’t have her nose in a guidebook as she checks off the famous sites on a list, her journey sanitized by a marketing team. A traveler ventures from behind glass windows in hotels and tour buses and meets people, connecting with the stories of a place and becoming part of them. The difference between a traveler and a travel journalist is that the latter makes a living from those connections and stories. Travel writers become attuned to cues and clues that allow us to dive into new cultures. As a spiritual travel writer, I have learned to locate — and be nourished by — the soul of a place and its people. But my life wasn’t always like that.

For more than 12 years, I was a Hollywood screenwriter. By day, I puttered around in a nightgown and fuzzy slippers that looked like bear claws, spinning tales of love, broken hearts, tragedy, triumph, and teen angst. By night, I went to screenings or swanky dinners. My life was a whirl of pitches, cocktails, meetings, contracts, and observing people so as to transform them into characters. Sounds glam, right? In fact, it was a cutthroat, cruel, crazy biz designed to make a writer quake, and it was sucking the soul out of me.

One day, I woke up and couldn’t do it anymore. No more pitches, agents, lawyers, waiting, pain — or income. I sat at home, peering into the abyss, wondering whether I would ever work again. Months passed. The abyss grew deeper and blacker. I checked into a monastery in Arizona, took a vow of silence, and didn’t speak for a week. And then, my sister called.

“There’s a new show on national public radio about travel,” she said. “You lived in Europe and Africa for 10 years, you’ve always been a passionate traveler, and you have a long background in theater. Why not record a story and send it in?”

For lack of anything better to do, I wrote the tale of my recent silent retreat, where I got into a food fight with a nun, was almost arrested on a dark, secluded road, and fantasized about why the statue of St. Francis frowned. My husband does voice-overs, so we had a small home recording studio. I related my monastic adventures before a microphone, and sent the tape to the show The Savvy Traveler.

Four days later, the phone rang. They liked the piece, asked me to be a regular contributor, and gave me my first assignment. Since then, I’ve been traveling, tumbling into wild and wacky situations that I first transformed into radio pieces and later into magazine and newspaper articles. At first I earned about as much as a teenager watering the neighbor’s plants while they’re on vacation, but things have improved. I’ve written for more than 70 publications and garnered many awards. I now pay my bills by nourishing my soul.

One day, an editor told me, “Your articles are different from other travel journalists because you really know how to tell a story.” I grinned, and thanked my years in Hollywood for teaching me how. “You know how to travel deeply,” said another editor.

I had never thought about that. My interest in travel had always been in what lies beneath the surface. I relish spontaneous meetings, arrows pointing me in unexpected directions. As a travel journalist, I have come to count on things that ruin other people’s vacations to jump-start a good story. For example:

Illness. In South Africa, my husband got an ear infection and couldn’t fly for a month. Panic. Stranded. Opportunity. We went to a Zulu sangoma, or healer, where she channeled her ancestors’ advice on healing — and it helped. On another trip, in Israel, I was terribly worried about an illness and got a diagnosis from a sheikh in a tent, after a meal of lamb couscous cooked over an open fire. He said I suffered from excessive fear.

Bad weather. In Switzerland, storms impeded touring, but led us to inquire how locals predicted the weather. The next thing we knew, we were in the home of a Wetterschmecker (literally, a weather nose) and entered a world where weather was predicted from signs in nature.

Missing what we came for. In Tunisia, we missed a desert festival, but then I had a chance meeting with a Bedouin horseman, which gave me precious entree into an ancient culture.

Getting sidetracked. In Ireland, I couldn’t connect for the longest time, until I heard a guide recount the truth of the potato famine of the nineteenth century: that people had been starved to death despite the fact that food was available. That opened my eyes to seeing the country in a very different way. In New Zealand, my fascination with the Maori and their creation myths led to our getting “adopted” into an extended Maori family, who remain close to us today.

Not everyone wants to be a travel writer, but a travel journalist’s skills can help anyone travel richly, safely, satisfyingly, and spontaneously, and come home with fascinating stories. In this column, I hope you will join me in travel that is transformative and soulful.