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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
For editorial matters:
Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
Contact Alumni Records for changes of address, class notes, or notice
of births or deaths.
Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
Email: alumni@pomona.edu
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Step by Step
Ann Marie Brown '85 explores the mountains, deserts and beaches of
California
By Devorah Knaff
Ann Marie Brown '85 is the worst person to ask: "Where's a good place to
go in California?"
Which is odd, because she writes travel books.
“The problem is I don’t have a favorite place to see in
California,” she says. “I don’t even have a ‘Top Five’ or a
‘Top 10.’ I have a ‘Top 100.’ Or maybe a ‘Top 1,000.’ I
just cringe when people ask me for tips about where to go
on a vacation.”
Brown has spent the last decade working full time as a
writer of books that help people explore the state’s most
beautiful places. Among her 13 titles are 250 Great Hikes in
California’s National Parks, Southern California Cabins
and Cottages and Easy Hiking in Southern California.
Brown, 44, lives a couple of miles outside Yosemite with
her husband, wildlife biologist John Kleinfelter. But a huge
chunk of her year—150 or so days—is spent on the road or
trail enjoying the state’s mountains, deserts and beaches.
“Life gets so much simpler when you travel,’’ says Brown.
“Traveling is a question of where to get food and where to
sleep. And everything else is just what you get to see along the
way. That’s all a bonus. Compared to this, life at the end of a
trip seems so much more complicated.”
 At Pomona, she often looked wistfully out her window at the
snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains, but with no car she only
rarely could enjoy them. After going on for her master’s degree
in journalism at Stanford
University, she took jobs in the
publishing industry, ending up as
an office-bound editor at a
guidebook company.
“I would sit across from writers
and listen to them tell about
all these wonderful things that
they had done, and I would say
to myself, ‘I think I could do
that.’” And so she decided to
give it a try—leaving the security
of her job for the arena of freelance
writing. Her first book was
both harder and easier than she
thought it would be.
“The writing itself, and the
traveling and the experiencing
new places—that was all wonderful
and easy. The making-a-living
part, and getting all of the facts
right and all of the million
details that you have to get right
to put a guidebook together—
that was harder,” she says.
Brown carries a small, handheld
tape recorder everywhere
she goes and talks into it as she
walks, spending “many tedious
hours transcribing all my notes
into my computer.”
“It’s painfully boring, but
I’ve learned the hard way that it
is important to capture the
details as they happen, and not
to rely on memory. When I transcribe
my tapes, I can hear my
excitement at seeing an awesome
vista, or my fatigue from climbing
up a brutal grade, and reliving those moments tells me how
to write the story. The tapes are also useful for getting my facts
straight: If I see a type of wildflower that I can’t identify, I
describe it to my tape recorder. When I’m back home, I look it
up. I also carry a digital camera and take zillions of pictures.”
Inevitably, things go wrong in the wilderness. There was the
time she set her tape recorder on the top of her car and then
drove off—losing a week’s worth of valuable notes. Or the time
she dropped her recorder in a lake, jumped into the bracingly
cold water to retrieve it but found the tape was ruined.
Her worst disaster of all: Once, she was so intent on photographing
a waterfall that she tripped on a slippery rock, fell, and
broke three different bones in her ankle. “I had to crawl on my
hands and knees back to my car, and wound up having two surgeries
on my ankle,’’ says Brown. “To this day I have six pins
and a plate holding my right foot on
to my leg.”
Her current book project is a look
at the entire length of coastal
California. Like the rest of her books,
this one should take about a year to
write—“but that’s building on years
and years of experience so that I don’t
have to start from the beginning again
with each book.” She also revises each
of her books every several years.
Brown’s publishers have told her
that her audience is made up primarily
of readers rather like herself. “The
typical buyer of my books is a woman
25 to 40. And that might seem surprising
because of ideas we have about
who goes on wilderness trips. But it’s
like asking directions when you’re
driving—guys don’t do it and women
will. Well, I think that the same thing
is true in terms of going out into the
wilderness: Women are more likely to
want to get advice from someone
who’s already been there.
“I give a lot of talks and lectures
and women in the audience often ask
me, ‘Is it okay for me to hike alone?’
or ‘Is it okay for me to camp alone?’
and I tell them that yes, it is. Be
smart, of course, and be prepared.
And then go and engage yourself in a
solitary experience in the wilderness.”
Brown, who reads 19th-century
travel accounts of California for pleasure,
finds one of the most appealing
aspects being a travel writer is the ability
to create bridges between her own
experiences and those of other people.
“When I write, I take what’s very personal to me—my
personal experience in the wilderness, or even being in a nice
hotel—and make it public. Travel writing is always that process
of taking the personal and making it public, giving people
a sense of my experience and yet also at the same time
always being aware of how the experience would be for
someone else.”
-- Devorah Knaff is the editor of Santa Ana River Press in Norco,
Calif. |
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