So happy you’re here!
I have long written about travel for print and digital 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—to write about the weird, messy, mystical, human side of travel.
I still think often of a rug salesman I met 20 years ago in Istanbul who invited me to be a rug saleswoman. I still think often of a truck driver named Taco, whom I met in a bar in Wyoming, who, in explaining why truck driving had made him fat, told me, “It’s not so much the pie as it is the a la mode.” I still think often of a woman I met in Mexico who had quit her job and given up her whole life to “follow her intuition,” and mostly just wandered around. I love those people. For me, their very existence is practically my religion. There is no writing if there are no strangers. There is no travel if there are no strangers—at least, not the kind of travel I want to do.
If that’s the kind of travel you’re drawn to, you’re in the right place.
Why pay to subscribe?
Paid subscribers receive full access to my posts and the website and never miss an update. Each new post goes directly to your inbox.
You’ll also get:
Quarterly Zoom writing classes
monthly writing prompts
the joy of supporting the arts
the chance to help keep this newsletter going
my full-throated gratitude for life
When paid subscribers write to me, I always write back.
Snippets from paid-subscriber notes:
“When I read your stuff I immediately want to take my work out and edit it for realness.”
“Your travel writing is thoughtful and deeply connected to place.”
“I literally laughed aloud.”
"When I read your writing it feels like home."
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. She teaches writing for the Cedar Crest College PanEuropean MFA program.
