I spoke to Potts about the personal, mythological element of souvenir collecting, unexpected parallels with Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, and the inevitability of mortality. Collecting souvenirs has been a way to mythologize his life, to externalize memories in a narrative form and maintain recollection of distant worlds. Why do we buy souvenirs? What historical roots ground this ritual? Is one way of collecting souvenirs better than others? Potts shares stories behind his personal souvenirs, showing that uniquely personal emotions imbue our collected objects with meaning. In his newest book, last month’s Souvenir, Potts guides readers through a philosophical, anthropological, and historical study of the objects we collect. Amid these tales, an untold story has developed: the meta-narrative of Potts’s life as it has transformed over those decades, a story best told through the objects he’s collected along the way. His tales-two of which have been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing series-appear in his books Marco Polo Didn’t Go There and Vagabonding, as well an array of publications. For nearly two decades, Rolf Potts has been writing travel essays both wild and meditative, entertaining and insightful, that follow his narrative persona through worlds of adventure, misadventure, loss, and discovery.
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