Lavinia Spalding has spent three decades telling stories from the road—from the cities of Spain, where she immersed herself in the world of female flamenco guitar; to the streets of Rome, where a chance encounter with an Italian man taught her about kindness and intuition. I’ve been following Spalding’s work for years, and had the chance to work with her on “The Cabin,” her 2019 Longreads essay about longing and belonging in the Utah desert—a piece that showcases her precision and nuance, and her feel for how landscape can be just as much a character as the people in it.
As the seven-time series editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing—an anthology published by Travelers’ Tales, a Palo Alto publisher—she has read thousands of other travel writers’ stories with the same attention she brings to her own. In volume 13, published this week, Spalding continues to bring careful curation to a series that resists easy definition. As she told me, the phrase “women’s travel writing” can summon a narrow set of expectations, and one of the things that makes this series essential is its aim to challenge and expand that picture. “There isn’t just one kind of women’s travel story,” Spalding said, “because there isn’t just one kind of woman.”
