On the Word 'Dispatch'

I’ve started calling my travel pieces “dispatches” and I’m not entirely sure I’ve earned the word.

A dispatch implies urgency. It comes from the Spanish despachar — to send off quickly. War correspondents filed dispatches. Foreign correspondents, back when newspapers maintained foreign bureaus, sent dispatches by telex. The word carries the weight of someone reporting from a place where something is happening, to an audience that needs to know.

My pieces are about wandering through Tbilisi and eating too much bread.

And yet: the word persists. Travel writing has borrowed it freely — Dispatches from the Edge, Dispatches from Pluto, dispatches-from-wherever by every magazine that wants to sound literary. At some point the urgency drained out of the word and what remained was a posture: the writer as correspondent, the reader as someone waiting for news from elsewhere.

Maybe that’s fine. Maybe all genre labels are a little aspirational. A “dispatch” from Tbilisi is no more dishonest than calling a blog post an “essay” or a newsletter a “letter.” The form shapes the writing. If calling something a dispatch makes you pay more attention to place, to detail, to the texture of where you are — then the word is doing useful work, even if no one is waiting by the telex.