The Out There Club
Writing no brand will fund.
The Out There Club is a group of people paying seven dollars a month so that I can keep writing, and so that almost all of it stays free for everybody else.
That's the arrangement. There are perks, listed below, and they're real. But the perks are not really the point, and I'd rather not pretend otherwise.
- The Long Letter — one longer letter a month
- Pages — the running journal from wherever I am
- The full archive of the Long Letter and Pages, back to the first one
- A postcard, sent from wherever I am when you join
- All of the aforementioned, permanently
- Works out to $7/month for 12.5 years
- I intend to still be writing in 2038
If money is the thing stopping you, email bryce@brycectravels.com and I'll just give it to you. You don't have to explain yourself. I'm not going to ask you to prove anything.
What your money gives away
Almost everything I make is free, and members are the reason it can be.
- Far Out, the Wednesday dispatch. Free, every week, to anyone who asks for it. No charge, no tier, no catch.
- The dispatches on this site. The archive stays open.
- Around 1,100 captions — and "post" is the wrong word for them, so I'll stop using it. They're short essays that happen to sit underneath a photograph, about grief and faith and doubt and the things people don't say out loud. They have reached hundreds of millions of people, most of whom would never open a book about grief or walk into a church. It is a strange pulpit. I didn't choose it. It's where the people are.
- The travel guides, at brycercampbell.com/guides. The entire point of them is that nobody gets to say they didn't know how to go.
None of that is behind a wall, and none of it is going behind one.
In their words
I asked a few members why they pay for this. Other readers just write in. Nothing below is edited.
"Because I believe in adventuring outside the box — who makes the rules? And you have chosen to take the leap and do something that goes upstream from the norm and I like the idea of supporting that. I have a 23 year old son that I have very much encouraged to go explore the world. Supporting your journey feels a bit like I'm supporting his."
"I originally followed you for the travel content, but I also resonated with and appreciate you sharing the deeper stuff too — what you've learned through your hard experiences and what God's been teaching you along the way."
"I'm beginning to think you just may be a missionary to people who won't ever go to a church or be around people of faith."
"I'm a part time bus driver. Yesterday I picked up a rider and asked how he'd been. He immediately told me his wife had died on June 25. We sat for 5 minutes while he talked. Then he said, 'we can leave now.' That's my 5 minutes."— on five minutes of courage
"Need more"— Muhammad, in his entirety
So: there are perks up there, and they're real. But the closest thing I can compare this to is missionary support, which is an odd thing to say about a newsletter, and yet here we are — a handful of people cover the cost, and the work goes out to everyone. If you're going to join, I'd rather it were for a reason closer to this one:
"Bryce, don't take the brand deal. I'll cover my share."
See you out there.
That's everything I've got.
Get Far Out — free, every WednesdayThere's no fixed topic. Far out is what you say when you didn't see it coming — the good and the wreckage both — and that's most of what ends up here: my brother Heston, who took his own life when I was 19; my father's cancer; marrying Grace, and what it actually costs to share a life after years of doing it alone; God, who I most often meet somewhere in the middle of an adventure, and rarely anywhere comfortable.
No. They stay free. That's the thing your $7 is holding up.
Probably. I write about faith honestly, which means Jesus comes up and I don't soften it. I've never asked a reader to believe anything in particular. If you've ever needed to hear someone say the hard thing out loud, you'll be fine here.
Then don't join. Get the free dispatches, read for a few months, and if you're still around and it's still doing something for you, the button isn't going anywhere. Get free dispatches →
It isn't. Email bryce@brycectravels.com and it's done — no guilt, no exit survey. And if you ever get charged by accident, tell me and I'll refund it the same day. I don't want a single dollar that somebody didn't mean to send.
Depends on the week. The running list includes a ditch in New Zealand, a tent on the shoulder of a highway in Nova Scotia, the Walmart parking lot in Bangor, Maine, the back seat of the Tundra more times than I can count, a Hampton Inn in New Jersey at 1:16 in the morning, a great many friends' couches, and my in-laws' spare room on the other side of the world. Grace has raised the standard considerably. Not, I would say, permanently.