So happy you’re here!
I have long written about travel for magazines and online publications, but at some point, I wanted more—more from my travel reading and more from myself as a travel writer. How many Top 10 Spas To Visit in Wherever stories must we consume? That’s why I started Dispatches From The Road.
Why pay to subscribe?
You’ll get:
the joy of supporting the arts
the chance to help keep this newsletter going
my full-throated gratitude for life
Paid subscribers receive full access to my posts and the website and never miss an update. Each new post goes directly to your inbox. Paid subscribers are also offered occasional free writing classes.
When paid subscribers write to me, I always write back.
Are you a writer or aspiring writer?
Each monthly personal essay contains a glimpse into the inner workings of the travel writing life and some have writing lessons woven in. I have been teaching creative writing on the college, adult-education, and graduate levels for 20 years. I’m here to help you!
Are you a traveler?
You’ll get travel tips, travel photos, and my tales from the road.
Are you a reader?
Well, thank you for reading me!
Full Bio
Diana Spechler is the author of the novels Who by Fire and Skinny (both Harper Perennial) and of the New York Times Opinion series Going Off. She has written for the Guardian, GQ, Washington Post, Esquire, Electric Literature, New York, Paris Review Daily, the Wall Street Journal, Glimmer Train Stories, Texas Monthly, the Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Harper’s, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Boston Globe, National Geographic Traveler, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House Open Bar, BBC Travel, Saveur, Bon Appetit, Ploughshares, and many other publications. Her work has been included in a number of anthologies, including Indelible In The Hippocampus (McSweeney’s, 2019). The actress Kristen Vangsness has twice performed her short story Reality on Selected Shorts, most recently in August 2024. Spechler is also an eight-time Moth StorySLAM winner, who has been featured on the Moth Radio Hour, the Moth podcast, and NPR. Her awards and honors include the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, the Orlando Nonfiction Prize from A Room of Her Own Foundation, a Yaddo residency, a Hawthorne Castle residency, a Ucross residency, a Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University, the writer-in-residency at Portsmouth Abbey School, a LABA Fellowship, a fellowship from the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, a Visiting Artist residency at the Betsy Hotel, and a Willapa Bay AIR residency. Her newsletter, Dispatches From The Road, is a Top 50 Travel Substack. She teaches writing for the Cedar Crest College PanEuropean MFA program.
