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A road less ordinary: a new anthology of travel writing goes off the beaten path—and raises money for an even bigger literary endeavor

Adam Vary

"Most of the gay travel anthologies I'd seen were just erotic--about going to the Caribbean and sleeping with the pool boy," says Raphael Kadushin. He wanted to dig deeper with Wonderlands, a new anthology of gay travel writing he edited for the University of Wisconsin Press, where he's the humanities editor. "Wonderlands is really a showcase for gay writers who I think are really good," he says. "A lot of them aren't as recognized as they should be, and I think that's a tragedy."

In these stories gay men are looking not just for new places on the map but for their own place in the world. The book opens with Mack Friedman's story of an aimless college boy who falls in unrequited love while working for a summer at an Alaskan fish factory; it closes with Mitch Cullin's musings on his trip to Japan, which reads like a literary Lost in Translation, sans Scarlett Johansson. In between, the book travels through Vienna, Syria, Morocco, and Nashville, then back from Antarctica, around a French farmhouse, told about the Pacific Rim.

"I think travel is such a quintessentially gay genre," Kadushin says. "Gay people grow up, even today, with this sense of being an outsider. That's great training for a travel writer who has to go to another country and size it up."

Kadushin gathered these Stories in his work for the University of Wisconsin Press's Living Out series, which be cofounded seven years ago as a publishing haven for gay and lesbian autobiography. "This series is really the only reason I'm still in book publishing," Kadushin says with a laugh, before going on to lament, "Probably the best writers in the country today have a very hard time getting published." Why? "It's very hard to make real money off of literate books," he says. "The majority of our books, we're lucky if we make our money back." But Kadushin hasn't thrown in the towel, lie and the other contributors to Wonderlands are funneling all the book's royalties back into the Living Out series. (A book of lesbian travel stories is forthcoming as well.)

To keep the cash flowing, Kadushin is about to hit the road again, wearing his second hat, as a writer for such publications as Bon Appetit and National Geographic. "Literally half my time is spent doing travel writing, and that's what allows me to stay in book publishing," he says. But one gets the sense that he'd be roving regardless of assignments. "It's as much about falling in love, the state of traveling," he says. "You're so stimulated, and everything's new. I mean, it's very addictive."

Vary also writes for Entertainment Weekly.

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