Today we’d like to introduce you to Joe Sills.
Joe, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
In 2012, I was a college dropout with a failed dream of becoming an archaeologist. A few years earlier, my academic career was lost in the whirlwind of a Derrick Rose-led Final Four run and a serious bout of depression fueled by John Calipari’s departure to Kentucky. When you’re young, everything feels like the end of the world.
I invested entirely too much of my self-worth in Memphis athletics, and as a 21-year-old kid, I crumbled under the weight of losing my identity overnight. I lost my girlfriend, flunked out of the UofM, slept on a friend’s floor for months, and eventually took a job delivering pizza at Garibaldi’s Pizza just to get by.
By 2012, I was working a steady job as a graphic designer in a South Memphis t-shirt shop. This was a slight rebound, but I was earning wages barely above the poverty line. The job came with a great work family and got me out of the dish room at Garibaldi’s, but I was constantly longing for more.
I remember looking out at South Memphis through barred windows and scrolling through my phone to see places that were then only a dream to me—California, Washington, Utah, Arizona. This was right when Instagram became red hot and it was the first time I had been exposed to the deserts and mountain ranges of the west.
At the time, I had only ever traveled as far as the Gulf Coast and never even been on a commercial airplane. I didn’t know how I was going to get out of South Memphis earning just enough cash to get by, but I knew that I desperately wanted to. On July 28, 2012, the wall of my office exploded with gunfire.
A failed robbery attempt shook the relative safety I knew and simultaneously altered the course of my life. Soon after, I quit the graphic design gig and struck out on my own as a writer. At first, I was relegated to blogging on Medium.com and working a full-time sales job at Verizon; but I eventually landed a job at a publishing company in Brownsville, Tennessee that offered me the chance to write and travel the country a little bit.
This job was still a grind. It meant hosting a sunrise radio show in Brownsville, covering local news like city council and county commission meetings late into the evening, and commuting to Memphis for any entertainment until I could eventually save enough to move back to the city in 2014.
In 2016, when Henry Turley Company purchased the South Main apartment I had been living in, all of the energy I put into climbing back onto my feet was in jeopardy. I loved South Main, and I dearly wanted to stay in my place. However, to do that, I needed to be gone for several months during renovations and find a way to endure a 50% increase in rent when I came back to Bluff City.
The solution came from a tent.
By this time, I was working remotely and no longer needed in Brownsville. I decided to use that freedom to live out of a borrowed Walmart tent in America’s national parks. To share the journey, I started up a summer blogging project called Souled Outside (my apartment had been sold, after all).
That blog took off. People in both Memphis and Brownsville asked me to start a GoFundMe page to support the journey. The stories also gained some attention from an editor at Travel Channel, who invited me to work for them based on that work.
Soon, I was traveling the world with assignments from what was then one of the leading brands in the travel industry. My first story at Travel Channel went live as I stood on the side of Mount Etna, a smoldering volcano in Sicily. I still remember the incredible joy of that moment, of feeling like I finally made it and knowing that I would never have to work behind barred windows again.
That story opened a world of doors to other outlets like National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Forbes, and Lonely Planet—all companies I still work with today.
Souled Outside became a full-fledged exploration company that now enables me to self-fund expeditions that involve archaeology, biology, and ecology. And, I’m fortunate to write about many of those expeditions for the outlets above.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
At the moment, I am traveling through some of the most remote areas of Africa documenting the impact of climate change and humans on wildlife. It’s a dream job. I have a camera, an assignment from National Geographic, and an incredible teammate—Margarita Samsonova—with her own unimaginable backstory. We regularly find ourselves within arm’s reach of lions, rhinos, and elephants.
On other trips, I have cooked in a castle with a Swedish countess. I’ve shared the dinner table of a subterranean research facility in China with a billionaire who claimed to be a candidate for the next Dalai Lama. I’ve grilled gas station burritos over an open fire in the deserts of Utah.
But the road here was not easy. I wanted to give up many times. I felt hopeless on a daily basis. I believe that dropping out of college cost me the majority of my 20s. I’m 34 now, and really just beginning to ramp up my career and hone my craft to expert levels.
I like to think that if I had stayed at U of M, I would have eventually found my way back to journalism and graduated with a degree. But what would that road have looked like? Friends in local news are overworked and underpaid. They are largely discontent with the status quo of that industry.
As a freelancer, I have almost total freedom to cover whatever stories I want anywhere on the planet I choose. It’s an extremely blessed opportunity that I probably would not have found if I had tried a more traditional route. Working in stressful environments in sometimes dangerous neighborhoods in Memphis prepared me for life on the road.
When shit hits the fan—let’s say a rhino charges in our direction or a lion issues a warning call— I tend to stay calm, and I attribute all of that to the rough road out of Memphis.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a storyteller, a one-stop-shop for magazines and websites that need a writer and a camera. Growing up, I was a theatre kid with a passion for lighting. I loved shining a spotlight on the stars of the show, and that’s what I try to do with my writing. I want to use my platform to shine a light on people who have inspiring stories that can change the way others look at the world.
Travel writing is sadly plagued by boardrooms that are more concerned with profit than inspiration. For this reason, outlets are inundated by listicles and substance-less articles that are quite frankly a disgrace to the gifted writers that came before us. This proliferation of quick, cheap content also makes selling profiles and longer stories much more difficult. For that reason, I started a podcast in 2019 called The Get Lost Podcast.
In 2020, we won Adweek’s Interview Podcast of the Year award, which I’m especially proud of given the massive influx of podcasts that launched during the pandemic. The show is specifically designed to tell incredible stories that editors don’t usually have the green light to commission.
We go canoeing down the Amazon with Matthew McConaughey. We follow polar explorer Mark Wood to a wedding at the North Pole. We go shark diving in the Galapagos with Kinga Philipps, the first-ever female star of a Shark Week show on the Discovery Channel. We retell the harrowing tale of a mother rhino that fights off lions for eight days in South Africa.
The podcast is simultaneously the creative project I am most proud of and is also the most challenging job I have because it is 100% my creation. The entirety of its success or failure is on me.
Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
If you set out on this path, be aware that there is no degree in travel writing.
Most of the other writers I encounter wandered into the field after becoming disenchanted with other career paths in publishing. Some were editors. Some were reporters. Others were marketing professionals. Only a handful went through the formal training of journalism school. Most of them can’t shoot a real camera, so learning that can definitely set you apart from the field.
Travel writing is also not always journalism. If you’re thinking about a freelance career, be prepared to run your own business and dig into the necessity of brand work. The reality is that, even at top outlets, pay is not great. Only a few travel writers can make it solely on their content alone. However, brands can and will pay well for your storytelling abilities.
For me, the balance comes in being selective about which companies you lend your talents to and by being as ethical and transparent as possible about those partnerships with publishers. For every National Geographic feature story I write, there are dozens of smaller stories that go to lesser-known outlets, business-to-business publications, or occasionally to companies that need help with press releases.
Contact Info:
- Website: getlostpod.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/@joesills
- Twitter: twitter.com/@joesills
Image Credits
Margarita Samsonova, Joe Sills, Liz Crossley Hadrian’s, Raven Todd, and Da Silva
