About Jim

I got my first taste of travel as a kid, piling into my parents’ Volkswagen van each summer to tool around the American West. Later, during breaks in college, I coaxed the same VW down rutted dirt roads to remote Baja beaches, where friends and I surfed, windsurfed and subsisted on quesadillas and Pacifico. Down there amid the Pemex stations and cardón cacti, I met guitar-playing Mexican fishermen, surf-crazed adventurers, doctors without borders and Baja 1000 drivers. They were full of life and full of stories. I loved it, and I began trying to sketch out in my mind a life of travel.

At about the same time, I discovered journalism, taking classes and working on the college newspaper. After graduating from UCLA with a degree in English literature, I landed a freelance reporting job at the Los Angeles Times, where I spent a couple of years writing about punk-rock-playing mayors, grieving poets and a thousand topics in between. It was a great experience, but my thirst for travel only grew. I embarked on a five-month backpacking trip around Europe, from Istanbul to Belfast. I thought it might sate my wanderlust. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I ran out of money, returned to southern California and worked as a staff writer at the Orange County Register. Then I landed a magazine assignment to write about competitive lumberjacks — guys who chop wood not because it needs to be chopped, but to see who can chop it faster. After a few days in the Adirondacks, wolfing down pancakes and studying the art of log rolling, I decided it was time to combine my love of writing with my love of travel. I left my newspaper job to work as a freelance writer.

Over the next 10 years, for magazines, newspapers and websites, I enrolled in bullfighting school, worked as a Hollywood extra, reported in Fiji in the midst of a coup and hung out with the writers of the Onion. I spent five months backpacking around Asia and another five in Latin America. My writing appeared in National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Traveler, Men’s Journal, Outside, Playboy, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Online Journalism Review and Public Radio International. My essay Lust in Translation was shortlisted in The Best American Travel Writing anthology, and other stories, including pieces on Tijuana and Thailand, were published in anthologies from Travelers’ Tales and Lonely Planet. In addition to writing, I taught travel writing at UCLA and UCSD Extension, and at San Diego Writers Ink.

In 2001, while I was freelancing, Michael Yessis and I started World Hum, a groundbreaking online culture and travel website. We spent $30 on the URL and a bare-bones design. Our goal was simple: to publish great narrative travel stories and essays. We had no editorial budget. We asked writers to submit stories. We added a blog, which turned out to be one of the first travel blogs. The site gained a loyal following. It remained a side project until 2007, when it was bought by the Travel Channel. Michael and I went to work for the company full-time for three and a half years, publishing stories, essays, audio slideshows, photos, graphics and video, and growing traffic to the site sixfold. We also launched Travel Writing in the Digital Age classes that consistently sold out.

World Hum won the gold Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers for best internet travel site, and in 2010, along with NPR, the BBC and Vanity Fair, it was named a Webby Honoree in the writing category. More than a dozen stories from the site have appeared in The Best American Travel Writing anthology, and The Wall Street Journal has raved, “Superb writing and stylish layout make visiting the site like cracking open a high-quality travel magazine.”

These days, I live in Los Angeles, where I can often be found writing, surfing and eating Korean tacos.