STEVEN NORTHCOTT

In high school, I always looked forward to seeing who the new Rotary-Ambassador foreign exchange students would be.  This was 1990.  Internet wasn’t a thing.  There wasn’t a Discovery Channel to allow intrepid explorers to tell their stories.  All I had were my new friends who could share their stories about Mexico, Japan, and France and marvel at both our similarities and our differences.  I had the luxury of visiting my friends once they left for their home countries and immediately I understood that this world was too exciting for me to not explore it. I fantasized about writing for Lonely Planet and having my own travel show.

 

But these were just dreams.

 

I didn’t appreciate that by taking the risk to move to Singapore for my first international teaching job, I would be taking my first step towards making this dream a reality.  During my first year abroad, I relished every chance I had to go somewhere. Immediately I explored all the places that sounded so exotic, so impossible to get to: Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam. I would soak in the views from the buses and the delight in the food on the street. I was all in.

 

When my Dad dropped me off at the airport on the way to Singapore, he shared that it was important to write things down.  “One day, you’ll forget all that happened”, he said. Having remembered those words, upon moving to Kuala Lumpur, I started to journal about my experiences. Initially, these stories were mine, not to be shared. I honed my writing, developed a voice, and one day, as though I was daring myself to be brave, I contacted a local magazine about my experiences and if they were interested in my stories.  I expected nothing in return.  Instead, A few days later, I received an email outlining how many articles they wanted a year, how much they would give me, and, an outline of how long each article should be. My travel series, Malaysia in a Mustache, was born. It was then that I started to believe that in order to achieve your dreams, you had to walk towards them. 

 

My experience as a freelance travel writer led me to work for EXPLORER.  A "Lonely-Planet-like” travel guide published to assist foreigners who moved to new locations; a residency guide.  I was hired to write about weekend getaways and the local entertainment scene for the Malaysian edition of the book.  I was over the moon and wrote over 50,000 words over the course of the next two months. I had done it. These were my first feelings of actual success. Of what I wanted.

 

But it wasn’t enough.  My passion was art and music.  I was always looking for ways to incorporate this into my writing.  When I would travel, I would always notice and enjoy that whenever I pulled out my guitar and started strumming, it would build a crowd of curious, local onlookers. It was an immediate and powerful way to connect.  Out of these experiences grew my idea for, On The Beat and Path: A travel video series focusing on music around the world.  This was before social media, before YouTube, and this was even before smartphones. I had zero experience making a travel show, no experience producing content; I didn’t even own a video camera. Slowly I started to develop a plan.  Within six months, I convinced my then-good friend and bandmate, Gary Blanton to take a sabbatical with me and travel to 18 countries around the world to explore music, art, and culture and make some documentaries.  To date, it was the greatest creative risk I had ever taken.