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The Birth of Adventure Divas
Holly Morris doesn’t seem like a television personality. She’s too real and quirky and smart. She’s got none of the plastic jauntiness you often find in TV talent. And her home — an old, half-remodeled house hidden from the street by an enormous tree, and tucked into one of Seattle’s residential backwaters — seems an unlikely place to start a media empire.
But appearances can deceive: This is ground zero for the future of travel television. Here, with papers spread over the dining room table and two desks crammed into the spare bedroom, she and her partners are wrapping up work on the pilot for their new show, Adventure Divas.
“This is about telling a different kind of story through traveling,” Holly tells me. “It’s not about seeing the sights. It’s not about knowing which hotels to stay in. It’s about what it’s like to live in other places, and other cultures, as seen through the eyes of these amazing women.”
The premise is pretty simple. Each episode, Holly and her crew take off for another foreign land. Though the goal of their travels is to meet and profile the dynamic, independent, creative women they call Divas. The trips themselves are the medium for the stories they tell.
To film the pilot, they went to politically controversial Cuba, arriving just days after the Pope’s groundbreaking visit.
“I wanted to go to Cuba precisely because it was such a mystery to me,” says Holly. “The trade embargo has been a de facto information embargo as well, and though there was obviously more to it than this, the images of Cuba that filtered through in my lifetime were of cigars, Castro and salsa.”
It turned out to be a great choice if only because the chaos there kept them fresh.
So when cars broke down (as they often do there) or their camera got dropped off a moving train (forcing them to rebuild it from spare parts), they couldn’t just spend more money and move on to the next location: they had to figure out how to deal with the disaster as part of their story. Which is all for the good, in terms of their storytelling, because as Holly says, “Real travel is about experiencing life, not just covering ground.”
This is not the usual formula for a travel show. Few travel shows are really about the experience of traveling. Fewer still are about the lives of the people of the country being traveled to.
How did you come up with the idea and inspiration to conceptualize your own television show?
I’ve long known that I reach my best, most effective self on the road. I learn from people and through movement. For me, travel rouses the innocent and brings clarity. As my 30th birthday bore down with the force of a loaded 18-wheeler, I couldn’t shake the notion that years of office-bound predictability had dampened my original spirit. So I grabbed my dusty backpack and took a month-long trip to Sumatra, Indonesia. I came back knowing that I was to be the architect of my own life. I decided that work and play can be one and the same. I became determined to get out of the office and onto the road. To take my locus of ideas to a medium with exponential possibilities for impact: television.
Why the Divas?
I wanted to celebrate fascinating women worldwide — artists, activists, politicians, singers, adventurers; women leading effective and thoroughly realized lives. These women are not infallible heroines, but they are icons with substance. They engage in possibility thinking. They do good; they are not martyrs. They don’t get derailed by the grit of life; they season their universe with it. And invariably, they reveal a fabulous sense of humor.
Starting a new media venture is never an easy task. What were some of the challenges you faced?
Well, I think it’s always hard to get financing for an ethic, as opposed to a more traditional business project. Ultimately, the most important visceral support came from our audience itself — those who responded to the idea, who we came into contact with through the website and word-of-mouth. Then there was my own challenge of having been grounded in the printed word, in book publishing. With television, obviously, you need to work more with sound and picture and less with words. Working in new dimensions was a good experience. The hardest part was having the confidence in myself to identify what my dream was. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have been ready. I couldn’t have withstood the possibility of failure, so I avoided the risk. You have to take a leap of faith and trust your instincts. It’s hard to turn something that is actually a pretty big idea into a reality, knowing that a dream can crash and burn. There have been many dark moments. A big project takes a lot of time to execute and the most important thing for me has been to try to stay true to my original instincts and vision.
Can you describe the distinction between Adventure Divas the television show, and the company/organization Adventure Divas?
Adventure Divas is an endeavor with a television series at its center, but with creative and production arms that will extend into book and online publishing. On our up days we like to call it a girl-driven media empire. On our down days, we realize we’re just a couple of chicks with voice-mail!
Do you feel Adventure Divas is a new type of business model?
Adventure Divas speaks to the synergistic relationship between media in contemporary American culture and the eclectic combo-platter of ways we, as individuals, are gathering information in a borderless world. It also bows to a sensibility that is entering our media, our consciousness, our businesses. A sensibility that we can do good work, and have fun. A belief that we can defy convention — even be political — and still end up in the black.
It’s interesting that you acknowledge “adventure” as a lifestyle. What are your thoughts about this?
Our culture’s relationship to adventure is changing. Adventure is no longer a weekend theme: it is philosophy. Adventure is about hurling yourself at the unexpected. It’s how you walk to the corner store and how you walk the Australian outback. Adventure can un-opiate the masses. It seems to me that you’re going to outfit the philosophy that will rule the future — a lucrative and exciting project.
USA Today
Maiden Voyages
K. Anne Eston
In the jungles of Borneo, a woman is fighting to save the indigenous orangutan population; in Cuba, a housemaid has organized a women’s coalition of handworkers to rebuild their community in the wake of post-Castro poverty. In India, a female anthropologist has created a co-op to employ women who have been cast out because of pregnancy outside the traditional practice of polyandry in Humla, Nepal.
These women may not measure up to the media’s standard of beauty or to society’s monetary-based vision of success. But, they are changing their lives, their communities, and their world. Holly Morris is making new feminine heroes of these women and others throughout the world in her new travel documentary series designed for television, Adventure Divas.
The series is partly inspired by Adventura Books, a series of women’s travel and outdoor adventure books edited by Morris for Seal Press, a well-known feminist publishing house at which Morris became managing editor. Adventure Divas is an interplay of individual biology with the excitement of worldwide travel. The format encompasses themes that have been done before with new twists of feminism, adventures to exotic places, and heroic personal stories. But, never have these elements been combined to celebrate and highlight the achievements of women.
Morris, who is an advocate of mentoring, says she wants to “create a brand new role model” by highlighting women who are not typically celebrities. And while the icons in the promotional data for Adventure Divas include such controversial media heroines as Tank Girl, Xena, and Thelma and Louise, Morris stresses that the programs are pro-women, not anti-men. “The message will be universal,” she states. “It’s not exclusionary [of men]. It will bring a broader perspective of what women do that will transcend gender. It’ll just be ‘Wow, look at this kick-ass person!’”
Morris has let her love of travel guide her in choosing subjects and cultural hot spots, the public’s enthusiasm has also given her fuel for the fire. “People get excited — they want to help push the stories forward.” Morris receives many letters spotlighting great American women, but for the time being, Adventure Divas will capture the international stage.
The project wouldn’t be complete without a crew of its own divas, including Morris’ mother, Jeannie Morris. “It’s meant a new relationship with my mom,” Holly says. “As one friend put it, your mother always has your back.” Mom Morris is a great partner in the project, bringing a background in both television and writing.
The impetus to create Adventure Divas is a culmination of Morris’ work as a political activist and her itch to travel, which she says was not satisfied behind the editor’s desk. “Travel has always been a vehicle to be my best self. I’m my best on the road.” But this project has also symbolized a very personal journey for her, in which she wants to embody the ethics projected in the program. “I aspire to be like them [the subjects]. If I didn’t do that, I’ve sold out — I’m a phony.”
With the pilot scheduled to air this fall, Morris hopes that the series will be picked up for a full schedule by next spring.
The Holly Chronicles
Hugo Kugiya
WOMAN. For Holly Morris gender is an assignment taken with scrutiny and insoluble energy. As Seal’s editor (editorial director, the Seal Press, Seattle), Morris has produced books by and for women, be they mountain climbers, lesbian mothers, battered wives, middle managers, Web surfers or aerobic instructors. At 31 she helped make Seal one of the country’s largest publishers of feminist literature.
Switch. To television.
Her own documentary show, “Adventure Divas,” will be on television next year. ... One year ago, Morris spoke as part of a panel on alternative forms of media. Her interests already roaming, Morris was asked to predict her future. Morris said: “To cultivate or support girl-driven empires . . . There aren’t enough of them.” The audience bellowed in agreement. ...
Her world has been books. In seven years at Seal, Morris ascended from intern to editor. She is best known for editing two anthologies of fishing stories by women, Uncommon Waters and A Different Angle. Her publisher, Faith Conlon, most values her ability to mentor young writers.
“Writers are drawn to Holly because she’s very nurturing,” said Conlon, assigning a typically female characteristic. “She lets them find their way. She’s a very sensitive person. And that’s an important asset.”
Morris’ own writing appeared in Another Wilderness: New Outdoor Writing by Women, and Home Field: Nine Writers at Bat. A collection of nine essays about baseball, it was released last April.
That month Morris also announced her intention to leave Seal to produce and host Adventure Divas. ... Ironically, she does not subscribe to cable and therefore would not now be able to watch her own program. She grew up watching as much television as most American kids, but it is largely missing from her adult life. It is not because of principle as much as unintentional neglect. As a child she watched the classics, gravitating toward their strong heroines, be they Bri, whom she considered the smartest of “Charlie’s Angels,” or Christy Love, the female supercop.
“The timing is right,” she said of Divas. “There is more sensitivity to the lack of powerful images of women. And it is not too radical an idea for the mainstream.” ...
The immediate comfort Morris has in front of a camera must have come from growing up around her television reporter parents. Her delivery is organic, full of natural pauses and restraint contained in normal speech, more like National Public Radio’s Ira Glass than, say, Diane Sawyer. Morris, on air, is unimposing and earnest, able to pass chunky ideas while leaving no trace of her ego. For example:
“You know, George Clinton defined Funk like this,” Morris said in the “Divas” promo (video), seeming as if the idea was occurring to her on the spot. “He said the . . . funk is the awesome power of a fully operational mothership. And I think that’s part of what a diva is — she knows her funk and she uses it.” ...
Morris has traveled extensively, mostly for pleasure. Now that it’s her work, she questions whether she is indulging herself. The answer, after a little guilt, is yes.
“Fun gets (overlooked) in the politics,” she said. “You don’t have to be a martyr to do good things. ...
“Feminism has been all about reacting,” Morris said of the activism of earlier feminists. “Now it’s time to be proactive.”
As in run for Parliament. Make the laws, rather than protest them. Therein lies her definition of a diva. It is a word boys have not needed. Because they have words like president, astronaut and quarterback. Or wide receiver, as Morris’ father happened to be.
Morris grew up in Palatine, Illinois, the youngest of four children, an even split of boys and girls. Palatine was white America’s America, an exaggeration of average, and hometown of Ted Nugent. Kiss played the prom at Morris’ high school; so did Styx, before it became Styx.
Morris’ parents were locally famous. Her father, Johnny Morris, played for the Chicago Bears. After his playing career, he became a sports broadcaster. His visibility provided an opportunity for his wife, Jeannie Morris, to become one of the country’s first female sportswriters. She eventually wrote a biography of former bear Brian Piccolo and later, like Johnny, became a sports broadcaster. ...
When Holly was 7, Johnny and Jeannie quit their jobs, rented their house and took the family on a one-year voyage across Europe and the former Soviet Union in a Ford Econoline camper. The trip became a book by Jeannie called Adventures in the Blue Beast, which was later turned into an Emmy-winning documentary, in which Holly can be seen grudgingly scrubbing the roof of the van because “I’m the lightest.” She jokingly refers to the scrubbing as her “feminist awakening.” ...
Morris’ mission at Seal was a plurality of thought, which meant publishing books by and for Latino women, black women, Asian women, lesbian women and young women. One of Seal’s best-selling books is Listen Up, essays by women mostly in their 20s about their experiences with race, pregnancy, body image, sports, sexuality, eating disorders and violence, among others. The pieces are deeply personal and are used as classroom text. It often reads like a diary. Listen Up was an idea initiated by Morris.
“The genius of her idea was to identify that gap in literature, “ said the book’s editor, Barbara Findlen, 32, also the executive editor of Ms. magazine. ...
This generation of young women, Morris believes, is hungry for role models of all types. ... Morris’ point is that a single feminist party line no longer exists. That a cause is not as important as having one. That she does not speak for all women but that she wants all women to speak. ...
Morris’ life is generally low on material, high in experience. ... She recently learned to skydive and plans to do it once a year. She prefers that which daunts her. Snowboarding, for example. ...
The last time she snowboarded, she spent the first few hours falling at almost every turn, but more violently when she turned right. About the fifth trip down the run, after joking that she feels more comfortable with the left, Morris began to understand that optimum control is obtained by keeping her weight on the edges of the board. The center seems safe, but really gives her no control. The edge is where she finds her power.
So it is with snowboarding, and life.
Library Journal
buzz
what the media is saying…
Excerpted from The New York Times Book Review (*selected as a New York Times "Editors' Choice," 2005)
"A delightful triangulation of adventure travel, telecommuting and self-reinvention… [Morris] can be hilarious.”