Interview by Corrine Zahra
A CONVERSATION WITH ALDEN JONES, AUTHOR OF EDGE OF THE WORLD: AN ANTHOLOGY OF QUEER TRAVEL WRITING (Blair) 

Alden Jones’ queer travel anthology is the first of its kind. Edge of the World comprises stories from sixteen writers across the gender spectrum and from around the world, all searching for belonging, for community, and for the freedom to simply be themselves. A finalist for the Lammy Award in LGBTQ+ Anthology, Edge of the World asks readers to consider where they belong, physically and socially—wherever in the world they happen to be.

Corrine Zahra: Being a traveler means being constantly in between places, and there seems to be a connection between that and being queer, that sense of in-betweenness, especially before coming out. Could you expand on that?

Alden Jones: As I wrote in the introduction, I think there’s something, especially in the pre-internet age, that really links queerness and travel in a way that cannot be untangled because most people were not born into a queer community. You have to leave your community and go searching for the community that will hold you. We can now do that through the internet, but it used to be that you had to physically go to Provincetown or a bookstore in San Francisco to find your people. 

I also think a lot about something Edmund White said in one of his books. It was something he wrote about being in Paris—because he moved to Paris when he was in his 50s. He said there’s something about being a queer person, who always feels like there’s something different about them or off about them, when you’re at home, and then you go abroad and you’re like, Oh, I know why I’m different. I’m not from here, and everyone else is. I’m a foreigner. So that is a reassuring feeling to queer people, that sense of not belonging—there’s a reason for it. 

I think things have really opened up a lot recently, but depending on where you are, there is this sense that you have to go away if you want to be open with your girlfriend; you have to go somewhere where it’s okay to hold hands. It’s okay to make public displays of affection, if that’s what you want to do without concern for your safety. So there’s that as well—the seeking comfort and seeking a place where you can be yourself without having to be like, I’m queer, what rules do I have to follow in this straight environment?

Corrine: Something I did notice is that, while travel is liberating and that’s the intention for travel for most people, there were writers in your anthology that did feel trapped or scared to be LGBTQ+ outside the US due to other countries’ laws and cultures. Moreover, I noticed that a lot of these writers are also not Gen Z, so their experience is very different to today. The internet is not mentioned as much, so a lot has changed. I was wondering if you could expand more on these ideas, especially what you have noticed ever since you started researching for this book about ten years ago.

Alden: I wasn’t really researching it as much as musing. What kinds of essays would I want to have in a book that was designed to be an inclusive LGBTQ+ travel anthology? One thing I did want to make sure I did was not just be diverse in ethnic backgrounds, but also age and also travel experience. For example, the essay by Sara Orozco was very important to this anthology because it took place in the 80s. That’s a time that Gen Z doesn’t really know much about. It was the AIDS pandemic, and Sara Orozco was just not thinking about it too much, just went to a gay club that was raided. We think of Stonewall, but we forget how common that was. At the same time, KB Brookins’s essay was by someone who hadn’t traveled outside the US before. When I’m reading it, I’m thinking, Oh, this really sucks to be Gen Z and queer, because I never had to think about people taking videos of me while I was dancing and posting them online, and all the ways we self-censor now because of the panopticon. It was really important for me to include a range of those experiences. We obviously can’t include all of them in a collection of sixteen essays, but to show some range between what it was like to be queer and traveling to someone who’s now in their 60s versus someone who just became an adult.

Corrine: How did the current political climate in the US change your thinking or approach when editing this anthology?

Alden: It was an interesting trajectory because in 2016 when I conceived of the book, it was just to fill a gap, along with it sounding fun and interesting. But by the time it came out in 2025, it was a completely different conversation. We were talking with a much more political angle, talking about safety and travel, talking about things that we didn’t think we were going to need to talk about, like going back in the closet for safety reasons, depending on where you are. And unfortunately, it became a much more serious topic. But also, it’s interesting to see how an anthology, or any kind of book, can evolve with the times.

Corrine: I’m interested in the bridge between queerness and travel. The idea of being constantly on the move means there’s a fluidity to it, like queerness. Travelers naturally find each other when traveling in the same way that queer people find each other. I was wondering if you could expand on those ideas.

Alden: Long ago, when I was first starting out in travel writing, you were not supposed to talk about your queerness or your identity unless it was pertinent to the essay. I was frequently told, or it was suggested to me, that I should remove any queer content from my travel writing because that wasn’t the point and it was distracting. I noted this for the first time when Ariel Levy wrote an incredible essay for The New Yorker called “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” and it was about being pregnant and going to Mongolia on an assignment and having a very traumatic birth experience. It was such a powerful essay, so many people were posting about it. And finally, someone said to me, “Did you know that she’s gay and she has a wife?” And I was like, “No, why wasn’t that in the essay?” That’s so strange because it was pertinent. Obviously, she was leaving her home, including her partner, to go on this assignment, and certainly her partner was involved in this incident. So she had deliberately left it out, and I found that so interesting. The essay came out in 2013. 

Corrine: Being abroad and not being able to be fully yourself in certain countries can show up in travel writing too, having to go back in the closet and assume a default of straightness, which feels unfair. Can you expand on how that contradicts the liberating idea of traveling?

Alden: If you’re a real traveler—like if you try to fully integrate into a culture or try to adopt the customs of another culture and leave your own behind—you get used to putting certain sides of your personality aside and figuring out how to communicate with people on their terms. If you’re traveling to another culture, you don’t impose your views on someone else; you try to understand their views. So if you’re feeling a homophobic vibe or if you know that that’s part of the culture, then you adjust in the same way that you would adjust by taking your shoes off at the door. There are little ways that we compromise ourselves that I don’t think are bad. It’s how we try on different sides of ourselves. That’s why we travel. We try to learn about ourselves through how we are in different contexts. I think it is a more natural thing to do when you’re a constant traveler, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing.

Corrine: I sensed sadness in some of these essays. For example, the essay written by Putsata Reang is about how she goes back to Cambodia, which is where she’s originally from, and feels that she cannot come out to her relatives there. She battles with internal shame. Travel is not always great. We have negative experiences. That is something that the form could explore as well. What does that say about the genres of travel writing and queer writing?

Alden: I used to have this idea as a travel writer in the early 2000s that travel writing was kind of a perky genre, like everyone was always positive and trying to sell the place. That’s one of the reasons I’ve pursued it because I think there’s so much interesting potential in the form that hasn’t been explored. It’s usually been pleasure and leisure, and I might have erred too much on the side of wanting to be serious.

I think that Putsata’s essay was particularly sad because it was so unresolved for the writer, and you could feel that the writer wanted to integrate her cultural belonging and her queerness. I think everyone would have let her do it and been fine with it, but she just couldn’t do it for her own reasons. But I think that’s so revealing. I think it’s important to explore those things. Some of the essays were about serious things but also written in a way that was lighter, like Daisy Hernández writing about bringing her non-binary partner home to meet her elderly father, who’s like: “Oh, your husband…” and Hernández thinking: “Should I go through this whole thing, or should I just let it go?” It was obviously a real struggle for Hernández at the time, but the way she wrote about it was humorous.

Corrine: We travel in different ways and for different reasons. For example, in Daisy Hernández’s case, she doesn’t technically travel. She visits her parents in New Jersey in the same way that Reang goes back to her country rather than travel to somewhere new. Would you say your anthology makes us question the genre of travel writing?

Alden: There was an amazing edition of The Best American Travel Writing [2004] edited by Pico Iyer, and it had a lot of essays that did not seem like they were travel writing. There was one essay about, back then, when you mailed in your credit card bills and checks, where everyone went to this place in Delaware to find out where those payments actually ended up. It was an amazing way to think about travel. I teach travel writing, so I always say to my students, “It’s really not about going to some exotic place; you can write about your home. But if you think about it as seeing the place in a fresh way, having something to say about a place, that’s place-based writing.” That was also part of my agenda with this book—to stretch not just the range of identities in terms of who’s telling the stories but also what constitutes travel writing. Does it have to be about going somewhere that you’ve never been, or can it be about going home? There were a couple essays about going home, and I think that is really important to the queer community because we’re constantly negotiating when we go home. Edmund White wrote this novel called A Boy’s Own Story, and it was about how when you go home to your family, no matter how old you are—you could be in your 50s—you are immediately slotted into whatever role you played in the family growing up. So, if you’re queer, that might be problematic. I find that an important exploration in terms of why we leave home and then maybe what it’s like to go back.

Corrine: Were there submissions by any writers who challenged your own thoughts on travel, on queerness, or anything else in a surprising way? And also, did you select the writers? What was the process?

Alden: I collected the writers so I didn’t put out a call. I had so many people in mind immediately. I’d read something by Alexander Chee in the New York Times, and thought to myself, that would be perfect, and Chee allowed me to reprint that. I deliberately looked for what I wanted. Zoë Sprankle is in her early 20s and was going to Pride for the first time, compared to Edmund White being in his 70s and writing about all his years of going to Key West. In terms of learning, I think one of the things that I mentioned earlier about KB Brookins’s experience of Pride and how much it sucks for some people now. For me, in the 90s, it was radical, and no one was taking pictures unless they were celebrating it. There was still that fear of someone from your high school spotting you on the street, but there was no fear of cops; there was no fear of being recorded. So it did enlighten me to understand more what it is like to be Gen Z and coming out. For example, one of the essayists in the anthology, Sara Orozco, is older than I am, and she’d been my student for a while when I taught at an independent center in Boston. However, I didn’t know that story. So it was crazy to think that she has so many stories that she’s told in my classes, and yet she never told this one. Interestingly, it turns out she hadn’t told her family either, and she didn’t tell me that until right before the book came out. Hopefully, a lot of the writers discovered things about themselves. As someone who teaches travel writing, I suggest to my students that you should change in some way; you should learn something or consider something new about your own life by the end of the essay. So hopefully there’s something surprising for everyone in all the essays.

Corrine: How has the anthology been received?

Alden: It got a lot of press from Condé Nast Traveler, the Smithsonian, Ms. Magazine. I won the Lesbian Media Lottery. I got Autostraddle coverage. It was very gratifying. I’ve heard from a lot of readers and done a lot of events. It was a very busy Pride month last year. I also just got the news that the anthology is a Lammy Award finalist. Hopefully that is a sign that there’s an interest in this kind of writing, and that maybe will encourage more queer travel writing.

Alden Jones is an award-winning author and educator, a Fulbright Specialist, and the editor of Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing. Her most recent memoir is the Lambda Literary Award-nominated The Wanting Was a Wilderness, hailed as “a master class in memoir writing” by The Millions. Her previous books are the short story collection Unaccompanied Minors, winner of the New American Fiction Prize and the Lascaux Book Prize, and the travel memoir The Blind Masseuse, longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A long-time travel educator and a former professor on Semester at Sea, Alden is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Emerson College and also teaches in the low-residency Newport MFA.

Corrine Zahra is a creative nonfiction writer and playwright from New York and Gozo, Malta. She graduated from the MA in the Humanities program at the University of Chicago, where she specialized in creative writing. She is the co-founder & co-editor of the only Gozitan contemporary literary journal called Mgħawġin, creating a space for Gozitan voices. She is an Adjunct English Instructor at Malcolm X College as well as a writing tutor within the University of Chicago’s writing program. Her first play in Gozitan dialect, Wirt il-Famulja, will be produced by Teatru Malta in 2027. Corrine’s writing has also been featured in Memoryhouse, Articoli Liberi, THINK Magazine, Lovin Malta, Times of Malta, antae, and Sliced Bread. 

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