SEE Magazine: Issue #560: August 19, 2004

If there’s one running theme in all of Jim Soliski’s travel stories it’s that there’s no way like the hard way.

"You’ve got to get down there and see the dysfunction," he says over the phone from CKUA, where he’s putting in his weekly volunteer hours.

Soliski’s 44 tales of a two-year journey through Asia are compiled in his new book, Does Your Meter Work?!

Refusing to tuck himself into the sanctity of westernized hotels, Soliski effectively made his way through all of the Orient’s most spectacular dumps, rubbing elbows along the way with every pusher, preacher and prostitute who teetered into his radius.

Travelling "´ la carte," as he puts it, was extremely rewarding, but definitely had its pitfalls - hunger, illness and terror being a few. Perhaps that’s what toughened up the 43-year-old writer for the treacherous journey he would encounter when he wandered into the land of publishing.

The book’s entire foreword is dedicated to Soliski’s attempts to get his work into print. He literally sent out thousands upon thousands of queries to newspapers and magazines, from which editors, merciless to the unknown writer, would not always politely decline his work.

Many cited "not seeing the point" of lowbrow travel pieces as their riposte.

His voracious querying was legendary in publishing circles. Hell, I even remember him from my job at a travel magazine in Montreal.

"Be nice to this guy," my editor told me, pointing to his name on a self-addressed, stamped envelope. "He writes all the time so don’t send him the form rejection letter."

But Soliski’s persistence and earnest disposition eventually won its way into the hearts of his harshest critics. After some time he developed a body of work spanning publications as varied in size and scope as the Chicago Tribune and Kingston Whig-Standard.

One former editor describes Soliski’s writing as being "so glib that he even fooled me into buying some of it."

Soliski also talked his way into a column for a certain competitor of SEE’s. It lasted until a reader accused him of making light of prostitution in Saigon.

After a read of Does Your Meter Work?!, however, which includes a longer version of the story in question, it strikes that Soliski doesn’t pass judgement or narrowly analyze his foreign surroundings at all. He’s made a style out of being glib.

" Reach your own conclusions, please," he quips. "That’s the biggest compliment you can give a reader. If, in some people’s minds I didn’t reach that, then what can I say?"

In the end, Soliski opted to avoid the hassle of middleman and published his book himself. If there are more in the works, he won’t say.

He’s done it the hard way and it shows in his unwavering commitment to keeping his spirits high in the face of hunger, illness, terror, and, more recently, rejection.

"The most important thing I’ve learned is to be happy and grateful for where I was born in the lottery of life. I know where I stand as a male in the world and a Caucasian in the world," he says. "I’m the luckiest guy on earth."