The Monday Media Diet with Jennifer Leigh Parker

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Jennifer Leigh Parker is a travel writer with interesting bylines all over. We are happy to have her with us this week. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a wife, mother and a wordsmith. I started working as a journalist in 2011 and have been lucky enough to be published in all sorts of places, like Bloomberg, CNBC, Lonely Planet, Surface Magazine, Watch Journal, the Washington Post, Forbes, Skift, and Saveur magazine. I also edited and produced two of my own glossy print magazines called Huge Moves and Centre (for Brickell City Centre in Miami). I think how I got here is interesting, so here’s the nutshell version:

I escaped Florida at 18 seeking creative fulfillment in New York City. I wanted New York so bad I would’ve hitchhiked. Thankfully, I didn’t have to. I auditioned into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and spent three blissful years in and out of the Drama Book Shop, studying dramaturgy, memorizing lines in seedy cafés and actually getting to perform in some cool Academy productions: Burn This (Wilson), Fool for Love (Shepard), Crimes of the Heart (Henley), Top Girls (Churchill), The Crucible (Miller), The Country Club (Beane), The Real Thing (Stoppard). It was a lot of Sanford Meisner moment-to-moment and Commedia del Arte mask work. Be a tree! Think like a snake!

Studying theater was formative in the best way. It didn’t matter what the story was. It mattered if you could convey the drama of being human in a way that created a physical reaction in others: making people laugh, cry, or just feel — communally. When that happens, it’s such a transcendent thing. When I enter a theater anywhere in the world, I am entering a kind of church. A sacred space. I get goosebumps. So, whether I’m working on articles, essays or my first novel (a work in progress), it’s all the same. I’m always chasing that feeling.

Describe your media diet.

My favorite moment every weekend is when the Financial Times newspaper lands in my driveway on Saturday mornings. I don my robe, steaming coffee mug in hand, and emerge from my doorstep to retrieve it like the father figure in Peter Pan. Wedged into the middle of the newspaper is the lifestyle mag, How to Spend It. Which I relish. I also get the Economist in print. When I’m not traveling, it’s the next-best way to get a macro perspective on things. The reporting is very sharp, and the analysis isn’t preachy. To understand what’s happening in the travel space (my reporting beat), I read these daily: Dossier, Robb Report, Conde Nast Traveller, Air Mail, the New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Vogue, Further, WSJ and Skift.

Substack has become an affair. I’ve created my own travel-themed one called Take Me With You!, but love seeing what other writers are up to. I’m following Noah Brier and Colin Nagy, Tina Brown, Lindsey Tramuta, Laura Itzkowitz, Ruth Reichl, Emma Grace Moon, and Gary Shteyngart. If you know what “Daddy’s Little Meatball” refers to, we will be fast friends. Shteyngart takes the idea that writers can only write about one thing and gives them the middle finger, while also making us pee our pants a little. I love his takes on martinis, tailored suits, watches, and the world’s worst cruise ship. I’ll follow his copy to whatever weird place he wants to go!

I’m also on the podcast bandwagon, and my favorite is a tech and business-centric confab called Pivot. Call me delusional, but I feel that Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway are my close personal friends, and they absolutely want to drink Zacapa with me on a beach in Tulum. They make being parents and ‘doing media’ seem so easy. (It’s not)

What’s the last great book you read?

I just finished Our Country Friends, a kind of modern-day Big Chill set during the pandemic (Shteyngart, again). I’m also in love with Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow. The tv show really falls tragically short of this masterpiece novel. Ewan McGregor as Count Rostov is fantastic, but they changed the entire ending! Is anyone else infuriated by this?

Every writer should read: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. For more than two decades Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University, and the book is a version of that class. That, On Writing by Stephen King, and Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott are permanent fixtures in my home office. In Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey, every hero encounters a mentor. Saunders, King and Lamott are mentors of the highest order.

What are you reading now?
Did I mention, I’m a member of a book club? We got together during Covid as a way to connect with other moms in my neighborhood. Now we’re all fast friends. Sure, it’s more of a quarterly wine club than a literary salon — but here’s the thing: most of us actually read the books, and we discuss them for a chunk of time during each club. One of us serves dinner in our home, and that might seem like a lot of work, but the value of personal connection during this batshit crazy time is invaluable.

While the club catches up on Our Country Friends, I’m getting into Vera, or Faith, Shteyngart’s latest and All the Cool Girls Get Fired by Kristina O’Neill and Laura Brown. Also, revisiting Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray since I went to see Sarah Snook play all 26 characters on Broadway and blew everyone’s mind.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

It’s straight to the features to find out if another reporter discovered something I don’t know yet. It’s not just travel features. I think it’s really important to pay attention to other industries that influence your domain—transportation, fashion, food trends and tech, for example, all influence the way we travel. I know how the print sausage is made, so I don’t bother much with the front or back of book, which are usually filled with fodder for advertisers. Heaven please allow me to live life and never have to write another gift guide…

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?
Hannah Arendt, Margaret Atwood, Truman Capote, Jonathan Haidt (ban phones in schools!), Robert Caro’s Power Broker and everything Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson (again and again and again).

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?
Petit BamBou, a French language meditation app with guided meditations and ambient sounds. Even if you’re not a francophile like me, the experience is way better than an overly amped up Peloton instructor who talks too much. Plus, wind in the trees or the sounds of a rain storm will help your kiddo sleep in a new place if you’re traveling.

Plane or train?

Train, absolutely. I recently covered the vintage Italian train renaissance, and discovered that it’s truly the best to get around Italy and see towns you might otherwise miss. Swiss trains, too, are very civilized and run like a Swiss watch. You can really do some deep thinking on an elegant Swiss train. By contrast, commercial flying is a dirty bus station inside a shopping mall.

What is one place everyone should visit?

The Faroe Islands. It’s a collection of vertiginous basalt rock islands in the North Sea between Iceland and Norway. The people are the attraction. It’s like visiting Vikings from the 18th century. They spear whales, eat whale blubber and drink schnapps to toast the fact that the treacherous boat ride you took to get to their home didn’t kill you. They wear sheep skins from centuries of tending their own sheep, who outnumber the human population. They’re the toughest, most resilient lot I’ve ever come across, and the hiking is just phenomenal. It would have made a great backdrop for a season of Game of Thrones, but these grassy rocks are too rugged and spread out to host a crew like that. But then, that’s kind of what makes the place great. Plus, the rocks are inhabited by colonies of puffins, the cutest bird in history.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I wrote a screenplay, which is a wonderful way to lose years of your life! It’s called The Money Channel. I was angry about American health insurance, which is still very topical. And the protagonist, Roxanne, basically goes down her own rabbit hole of trying to expose corruption at a health insurance giant. The inciting incident is a lack of insurance coverage leading to the preventable demise of her mother. So, it’s kind of a modern Silkwood, but it’s also set in a financial news network (informed by my own reporting years at CNBC in New Jersey), where Roxanne is trying desperately to get her story on air. There’s something about the two worlds together that makes it overly complicated. I toiled for years over it, and even went to a writing retreat in Costa Rica to work on it with a gaggle of other hippie woo-woo writers.

It was great fun in the rain forest, but I’ve since learned that it’s the simplest stories that resonate. Like the beads of one pearl necklace. One day, I’ll go back in with a scalpel and separate the two narratives at odds with each other. For now, I chalk it up to my own evolution. There are no short cuts.