Thank you to Debby Waldman for interviewing me! CLICK HERE to read the entire interview
Brave-ish: A Conversation with Travel Journalist and author Lisa Ellen Niver
Niver is an inspiration for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that she’s unafraid to reinvent herself—and she always makes it work
When I met Lisa Niver in a writing workshop a few years ago, I was impressed with her confidence and with her commitment to her career as a travel journalist, a career that has taken her to 103 countries and given her some amazing opportunities—scuba diving with barracudas in the Philippines, hula-hooping with Maasai warriors in Tanzania, running kids’ programs at Club Med locations and on Princess and Royal Caribbean cruise ships, driving a Lamborghini 150 miles an hour on a race track in Las Vegas.
You only have a career like that, I figured, if you’ve spent your whole life gearing up for it.
Boy, was I wrong. When I read Niver’s 2023 memoir Brave-ish: One Breakup, Six Continents, And Feeling Fearless After Fifty, I discovered she’d never set out to be a travel journalist. She actually went directly from the University of Pennsylvania to the University of California San Francisco Medical School in the fall of 1989, when she was 21 years old. Her whole life she’d planned to become a doctor, but early in her program at UCSF she began thinking maybe that wasn’t the right career path.
During a one-year leave of absence, she took scuba diving lessons and began doing ceramics—two activities that are still a big part of her life. She also taught preschool and earned a master’s degree in education. Scuba diving can be an expensive hobby if, like Niver, you want to dive in exotic locales. When she learned that one of her sister’s friends had worked at Club Med, she decided that might be a good way to scuba dive on the cheap. The Club Med gig led the way to the cruise ships, which led to the career she has today, doing TV segments, a video podcast called Make Your Own Map, and writing travel stories for publications like Reader’s Digest and companies including Booking.Com and Tylenol.
Brave-ish, which Niver initially conceived as an opportunity to write about the 50 brave things she did before turning 50 seven years ago, has received a pile of honors and awards since it was published, some from familiar sounding organizations (Forbes included it on a Best New Non-Fiction list) and some, like the Hearten Award, that I’d never heard of. But the Hearten Award was, to me, the most fitting, because Brave-ish won in the category of Uplifting & Inspiring Non-Fiction and Memoir.
Brave-ish is very much a travel book—I, for one, am quite envious of the incredible things Niver gets to do and write about—but it’s really a story about hope and fortitude and not giving up, and how, if you combine those three qualities, you can go far.
CLICK HERE to read the entire interview
Debby Waldman Substack: What To Believe
