This story originally appeared in La Fronde’s Nov. 3 issue.
A group of women travel writers, tired of chasing keywords, top-10 lists and sponsor obligations, decided to go analog. And the fruit of their labor is Rewrite Travel, a monthly mail club where each issue is devoted to a destination that one of its writers has lived in or spent real time in — and no one knows where it is until it lands in their mailbox.
The mailer itself is made to feel like a gift from a dear pen pal catching you up on their intrepid excursions abroad. Inside is a smattering of personal short stories from writers who’ve been to the featured destination of the month, along with a letter, art prints, a fun creative activity, a food or drink-related story, and other little keepsakes like puzzles and stickers.
What I adore about this project is Rewrite’s commitment to being authentic and thoughtful with its mission. They rely solely on subscriptions for revenue that they split equally between the team, composed of Hana LaRock, Alice Nettleingham, Elen Turner, Amanda Finn, Emily DiFabio and Katie Lockhart. There are no sponsored placements or underwriting. They aren’t writing stories based on press trips, either. It’s all based on destinations and experiences they can personally vouch for. Right now, the club plans to ship its monthly issues to 190 countries, including the U.S., where I’m excited to get my first package in the mail soon. The first issue ships Nov. 15, and if this also sounds like something you might want to get your hands on, you’ve got until Nov. 8 to sign up.
The team runs as a co-op collective and its members are spread all over the world in places like New Zealand, the U.K. and Colombia. It was a little tricky getting everyone across time zones, but I was able to catch up with two team members, Hana and Alice, about how the idea came together, why being women-led matters to them, and the destinations they most love traveling to solo (which is also a personal hobby of mine).
Stephanie: Congratulations on the upcoming launch! To start, how did Rewrite Travel come together?
Hana: I had been in this all-women’s writing group online for a couple of years and there’s a couple different groups within that, and that’s how I got connected to these women. So for a while, we’ve been talking about doing our own publication, because inside of this group we kind of come together and talk about when we have frustrations with an editor, a pub, the organization or the industry overall. For a long time, we’ve been talking about wanting to start our own thing, but we didn’t know exactly what that could look like.
We were hesitant about doing another magazine or another pub or another blog, because we didn’t know if, in the end, we would end up having the same problems that we were trying to get away from, right? Like SEO issues, or budget issues, or writing about things just because we felt like we had to, because the industry would be pushing us in that direction. And then I said, you know what? Let me reach out to Alice, because I actually worked with Alice. She was my business coach a couple years ago.
I don’t actually remember how we met, but Alice once upon a time had a pretty popular travel blog called Teacake Travels, and I just felt like she was the person to go to, because I felt like she would know how to take all my ideas and bring them together. When I reached out to her, we hadn’t talked in a little while. It’s been a minute. I had kids. She was in Cambodia. There was just a lot going on. But she said, “You know what? I’ve actually been thinking about doing this snail mail thing,” and I was like, “What is that?” And then, with our ideas of what we want to do and what she already had in mind, we kind of brought it all together, and here we are.
Stephanie: Exciting. Alice, when Hana approached you with this idea, what were your initial thoughts about starting this project?
Alice: It was so interesting, because she kind of came to me with all the gripes of the travel industry, and I definitely felt that pain. I left the writing industry six years ago because of this reason. What started out as a passion, just writing about travel, suddenly became about keywords, top 10s, SEO, all this jazz, and it really lost the magic for me in the travel industry. I had had my eye on snail mail for a couple of months, and there are so many things I love about it. It’s so nostalgic. There are kind of no rules. You can create what you want, and you can tell true, authentic, real stories. Me and Hana and all the other women in the group are very passionate about that. We want to be unedited and to just really share the true world, and we feel that through the internet that’s been lost. So we were really excited when we started to bring this together.
It’s so cool, because we haven’t even released issue one yet. It actually will be posted on the 15th of November, so we’re excited about the buzz that’s happening already.
Stephanie: When it comes to putting the package together, tell me a little bit more about that process. Who’s the team that’s making this happen?
Alice: We all have different roles, and we’re all writers, actually. But we nominate one or two writers every month to represent that destination. We have our beautiful artist, and — Hana, it’s probably best you explain all of these roles.
Hana: I’m one of the copywriters. We have two copywriters on our team. And I think the point also to share is that we’re totally a co-op collective. We make equal decisions on everything. Some of us might say, “That’s not important to me.” But if it’s really important to someone else, whatever they want to do is fine. If we can’t come to a specific agreement about something, we take a vote. We really love that aspect of it, because some of us have been editors, have been writers, and maybe didn’t feel we had as much of a say in the end result of the story once it was published.
We all figured out our roles, which we chose ourselves. We had a big spreadsheet, basically, of all the destinations people have not just been to, but lived in or spent significant time in. And then we divvied that up based on the time that people had. Two of us are moms. Some of us are traveling a lot. Alice has been moving. We also thought about what people would be interested in. Some of us have been to destinations that might not be as popular, and we’re okay sharing those as well. But we also want to make sure that we give our audience what they want.
Once we got our calendar set for the year, Alice took the lead on operations. In terms of the posting and the paperwork, I’ll let Alice talk about that.
Stephanie: I wondered how the whole shipping of all of this works…
Alice: I’m becoming best buddies with Royal Mail. Forget about all the SEO rules — now I’m learning about all the postage. We have to factor in everything. We have to factor in the weight. How much can we fit into one envelope that’s not going to take us over a certain price point? What colors are our envelopes? All these decisions — it’s very intricate. And obviously we’re an international snail mail club as well, which has been really interesting, because we wanted to reach as many people as possible. We can ship to 190 countries. But that does involve a lot of research and logistics, and we just had no idea where most of our subscribers were going to come from. Actually, I think it’s over 90% that we’re going to be shipping to the States, which is really interesting. But we have people from — where are they from? The Faroe Islands, Singapore…
Hana: Cape Verde. And we’re also based in different places. One of us is in New Zealand. Alice is in the U.K. now, but just came from Cambodia. I’m in Colombia. We thought that was important too. If our own team gets the mail, what is that going to be like for somebody who might be in a destination where mail isn’t so great? Obviously some of these things might be out of our control, but we’ve done a lot of research to ensure that whoever subscribes is going to, in fact, get that package or that envelope.
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Stephanie: Tell me a little bit more about the content that you plan on writing, because you mentioned there were stories connected to destinations. Is it more like first-person essays about people’s experiences being there? Recommendations for people who want to go to these places that you pick? I’m curious about the range of how you’re planning to talk about these spots.
Alice: We really wanted to balance it from all different angles. Obviously, with snail mail, it’s really about personal letters. So we really wanted heartfelt, true stories — a story that you’ve never read before. But equally, we want to showcase the destination, so there can be recommendations in there, or suggestions on what to do, what to see. It really is the perfect recipe of personal stories and information that actually transports [you] there when you read it.
Hana: A kind of old-school, golden age of travel journalism. Like reading someone’s actual memoir of being in a place. We don’t even know what someone is going to write when it’s their month. I just read one of our writers’ stories for the first issue, and I was like, wow, this is amazing. Each of us is bringing our own writing style, story style, depending on what we did there, how we write. Me personally, I like to talk about a trip I did there, or something that stuck out to me, maybe a food that I ate while I was there, and it just happens to align with the restaurant I visited. So we’re not forcing any of that. It’s just what comes naturally to each of us.
Stephanie: I was going to ask how the dispersing of assignments went. Is it like someone says, “Hey, we’re going to cover this place, so therefore we need an essay and something else”? Or is it just, “Hey, we’re covering this spot. Come back with whatever you think you want to write about or cover within this beat”?
Hana: Once we had the list of destinations, it wasn’t really assigned — it’s collective. We had 12 months to cover. We saw the destinations. We balanced it out so that each writer had two months that they were responsible for in terms of the writing. We might all contribute, or one of us might support someone else’s months. But we each have two. Otherwise, it would be too much, I think, for one person. And then in terms of what goes inside each issue — Alice, go ahead.
Alice: I think we really want to break the system that’s been created. You know, the top 10 things to do here. Or in terms of sponsorships: even when I was going on brand destination projects, we had to include certain things, and for us, we don’t want to have to do that. If we genuinely love it, it’s in there. But we are not being paid by anybody to include that name, and that is so important to us. We want to break the unhealthy things that have come about in travel journalism and really bring it back to roots and honesty and authenticity.
Stephanie: You’re a fully women-led group, and I wanted to talk a little bit about that, because I know from your description that being an all-women group was something you were very proud of. How is it working in an all-women environment, and how does that shape the content and the stories that you create?
Hana: My experience in the travel world has largely been shaped by the women that I’ve been working with, which is actually beautiful. There are probably people in our group that have experienced some discrimination because of being a woman, or a woman in this industry. Obviously, a lot of my favorite travel memoirs that I’ve read have been written by men. So I think just having our voice behind there [matters], and also our experiences in different destinations are going to be different than men’s, right? I’m married to a man, and sometimes he’ll say something like, “Oh yeah, it feels so safe here,” and I’m like, “Yeah, for you.” So I guess I just want to keep that going, because that’s what it’s been for me. I want to stay working with women, if that makes sense.
Alice, we never actually talked about this, so it’s a good question.
Alice: I’ve always been so passionate about things from a female perspective. My travel blog, Teacake Travels, was so women-focused, very much about solo female travel and having the courage to do that. And I wrote a number of resources purely for women, because I just knew that we needed that. It’s quite interesting — I haven’t told you this, Hana, but when I announced that we were starting this, I got quite a few messages from men telling me how I should do things! They were like, “You should market in this way, and you need to do that.” Never asked for advice. Completely unsolicited, all coming to my inbox. I found that really interesting.
Hana: I didn’t know that. But at the same time, I think we have a couple of subscribers who are men. There’s nothing about the content itself that’s necessarily for women. It’s for anybody who wants to read it or enjoy it. It just happens to be [written by] women.
Stephanie: So this is going to be once a month that people will get their envelope from Rewrite Travel in the mail? Are there any plans to expand in the future? I know you’re just getting started, but what do you think the future holds for you at this point?
Alice: Well, we did discuss it. We just feel that maybe in the future, retreats could open up the way for the writers to meet each other, because that’s what it’s about. It’s about community. So we are thinking about it.
Hana: Retreats would be awesome. Maybe meetups. Even though the whole point of what we’re doing is physical mail, something that you can touch, we’re not fundamentalists in any way. There is going to be an aspect of what we do that’s online, but that’s more about the community, or just bringing awareness to what we’re doing. The main product, so to speak, is always going to be physical. We’re most likely going to have a digital newsletter, but that will be behind the scenes, getting to know who we are. We do have subscribers that have subscribed for a full year, so we are committed! At least for 12 months.
Stephanie: I’m a big solo traveler myself, and I was curious, is there a favorite destination that you’ve solo traveled to that you recommend to people?
Alice: For me, I’ve always loved going to destinations that they say women can’t go to. The best places that I’ve been to in that respect: I’ve been hiking in Pakistan. It’s the best hiking I’ve ever done. I absolutely loved it. I also traveled solo in Bangladesh. I think Bangladesh is a great country to see.
Hana: My situation is a little different. I’ve been traveling with my partner since I graduated from college, so I haven’t done too much solo travel, actually. However, I’m also a mom, and what my husband and I do is solo trips while traveling as a family. We’ll go somewhere as a family, and then one of us will do a solo 24 hours where, unless it’s an emergency, do not message me. I am getting to experience this by myself. I did that in Berlin.
Stephanie: Oh, I just came back from Berlin, actually. I love that city.
Hana: It’s an amazing city. So we did that there. We’ve done that in Spain. We try to make a point of at least getting some solo time if we can. I just recently took my daughter — I have two kids — to Florida. So not quite a solo trip, but a solo parenting trip, I guess you could say.
For me, I would have to say Budapest. I went there with my partner, and I also went there by myself while we were living in Portugal. Once my daughter turned one, my husband spent time in Amsterdam by himself, and then I went to Budapest by myself. My cousin was there. This might be an unpopular opinion — I like solo travel, but I like to know that I have somebody there. I have some anxiety, so it’s nice to have someone there that I can eat dinner with or have a meal with, but I can still go off on my own and do my own thing during the day. So my most recent trip where I flew by myself and did everything was Budapest. I just think it’s a great city to walk and explore and get lost. It’s kind of familiar but kind of different at the same time.
