The Nevada Sagebrush

UNR doctorate student Suzanne Roberts plans to spend part of her summer in Mongolia after winning a free trip from National Geographic by entering the Next Great Travel Writer Contest.

Out of 500 entries, Roberts won first place. The results were announced last month. On July 5, she will go to Mongolia for two weeks and get to write a story about her experiences for the National Geographic Traveler Web site.

During the two weeks, some of the things Roberts will be experiencing are Mongolia’s century-old Naadam Festival, traditional ways of Mongolian horse breeding, visiting with Nomadic Mongolian families, and hunting for dinosaur fossils, according to the travel writer contest Web site.

The Next Great Travel Writer is a contest put on by National Geographic Traveler and the travel service, Travoca. This is the first Travel Writer Contest that has ever been held.

The essays had to cover a travel experience in a local or international destination. Writers had to try and fit a travel experience into a 300-word essay.

Roberts was notified of this event through Michael Branch, a professor of literature and environment in UNR’s English Department.

After receiving an e-mail from Branch, Roberts chose to enter the contest. Roberts decided to focus the essay on her travel experiences in India for a month. She focused on Indian cremations.

“I chose to write about the cremations because in many ways it characterizes India, a paradoxical landscape where no separation exists between the beautiful and the ugly, the spiritual and the gritty, life and death,”Roberts said.

Keith Bellows, editor in chief of National Geographic Traveler, rated essays on their use of grammar, literacy and story-telling merits.

“Suzanne’s story just grabbed me—and that’s hard to do in less than 500 words. And she was dealing with a tough subject—death,”Bellows said.

Currently in the doctorate literature and environment program at UNR, Roberts is two chapters away from finishing her dissertation, “The EcoGothic: Pastoral Ideologies and the Gendered Gothic Landscape.”

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