Heide Brandes is an award-winning travel and features writer based in Oklahoma City with bylines in The Smithsonian, Reuters, National Geographic, BBC Travel, Southern Living, National Wildlife Federation, The New York Times, The Guardian, AFAR, Cowboys & Indians, Bourbon+, Beer Connoisseur and dozens more. After 25 years as a journalist in Oklahoma, including seven years as a Reuters Oklahoma correspondent and executive editor of 11 community newspapers, she traded the daily grind for full-time freelance work and never looked back.
She specializes in adventure travel, Indigenous culture, food and drink, conservation and the kind of human stories that get under your skin. She co-hosts the “Untethered & Wanderwise” podcast, aimed at adventurous women over 45 who refuse to settle down quietly. She serves as Vice President of the Society of Professional Journalists Oklahoma Pro Chapter and is a member of SATW, OWAA and NATJA.
When not on assignment, Heide is likely belly dancing (more than 25 years and counting), crawling through caves or chasing some new corner of the map to places worth remembering.
What got you into travel journalism?
I spent nearly 20 years as a daily news journalist in Oklahoma covering everything from tornadoes and bombings to executions and tribal sovereignty, and I loved it fiercely. But, hard news can make you jaded and harsh.
A little over 10 years ago, I realized the stories that stayed with me longest were the ones that took me somewhere unfamiliar, whether that was a powwow on the Choctaw Nation, a cave system in the Ozarks or a small-town diner where the waitress knew everyone’s coffee order. Travel journalism let me chase that feeling on purpose. It married my reporter’s instinct for asking questions with my lifelong restlessness, and it gave me permission to treat curiosity as a job description.
What’s the most challenging part of being a travel journalist?
The math. Travel journalism is romanticized as a lifestyle, but the working reality is rate sheets, query letters, kill fees, expense receipts and the constant calculus of whether a story will pay enough to justify the time. Editors want fresh angles on places that have been written about a thousand times, and you have to find the one detail nobody else noticed.
The other challenge is staying honest when you are a guest. Press trips and hosted travel are part of the ecosystem, but readers deserve writers who will still tell the truth about a mediocre meal or an overhyped trail.
What is the most rewarding aspect of travel journalism?
The people. I have had Turkish weaver explain why weaving Turkish rugs by hand is sacred. I have sat with Choctaw bison ranchers who are restoring a herd and a foodway at the same time. I have listened to women in their 70s tell me about solo backpacking trips that started after a divorce. Travel journalism is really human journalism with a passport, and the privilege of being trusted with someone’s story in a place you just arrived is something I never take for granted.
What is something you wish people knew about travel journalism?
It is reporting. Real reporting. The best travel writing is built on the same scaffolding as any good news story, which means verified facts, named sources, primary documents, historical context and a willingness to leave material on the cutting room floor when it does not hold up. A 1,200-word feature might require 30 hours of interviews, three days of fact-checking and a research file thicker than the finished piece. The hammock photo on Instagram is a sliver of the job. The rest looks a lot like any other beat reporter’s notebook.
How have your cross-cultural experiences shaped your point of view of the world?
They have made me suspicious of single stories. Every place I have reported from has at least three competing narratives running underneath the surface, and the loudest one is rarely the truest one.
Working with Indigenous communities in particular taught me to slow down, ask permission, listen longer than feels comfortable and accept that some stories are not mine to tell. Belly dancing in a tradition rooted in cultures not my own taught me the same lesson in a different key. The world is bigger and stranger and more generous than any of us can hold, and humility is the only honest response.That, and we are all more similar than we are different. That person in Lebanon wants the same things we want. They want their kids to have a better life, they want to laugh with loved ones over a meal, they want to make a difference in the world. Travel makes the global population a bit more intimate.
What have you enjoyed most about being a NATJA member?
I love the community. Travel writing can be lonely work, and NATJA gives me a tribe of people who understand pitching, reporting, traveling and rebuilding the calendar from scratch every quarter. The professional development resources have sharpened my craft, the conferences have led to real assignments and the conversations with other members have talked me off more than one ledge.
NATJA reminds me that this strange, wonderful job is shared work, and that we are all rooting for each other to land the next great story.
