By Brent Thompson
Photography by Jenny Adams
Jenny Adams is a Mountain Brook native who lives in New Orleans…but that’s hardly the whole story. A dizzying path has taken the renowned freelance writer and photographer from her hometown to a city roughly 350 miles down the road.
“I went to College of Charleston, and I stayed there for a year after college,” Adams says, speaking by phone from her Crescent City home. “I majored in Corporate Communications and Eastern
Religious Studies. I moved to Montana for six months just to check it out, and then I moved to New Zealand for almost a year. I ended up going to Thailand for two months—which plays into the Eastern Religious Studies thing—and I became infatuated with Southeast Asia.”
But a decision to return to the U.S. proved formative in Adams’ eventual career track. “I went home and enrolled in graduate school at Ole Miss, got a job at a magazine, and that’s when I got into the magazine world. I didn’t complete grad school—I took a magazine job for four years and then went freelance in 2007. Then I went straight back to Southeast Asia and, since 2007, I’ve been splitting my time between America and Asia.”
And, by the way, Adams tosses in one more stop along the way, which also proved life-changing. “I moved to New York and was off-and-on with New York for about 10 years,” she offers. “During that time, I met my husband who had a company in Manila, and we started dating long-distance.”
At first, Adams’ writing focused on the food and beverage industry. These days, however, she focuses exclusively on travel writing. Some of Adams’ recent work can be found in Food & Wine, Fodor’s Travel and Conde Nast Traveler among others.
So, the question must be asked—of the places in the world she has visited and lived, how did New Orleans become her adopted hometown? “When my husband and I began dating, he was in Manila, and I was in Manhattan. We finally decided it was time to move in together, but we’d both been in big, crowded concrete cities. We wanted a place with more green spaces and a more affordable approach to living. We chose New Orleans because I already had several friends living there, and it seemed like a fit. We love dining and music and colorful characters. It’s been a perfect spot for us. We are headed back over to Asia for a month in May. So, we are still half in this hemisphere and half in the other,” Adams says with a laugh.
While incessant travel can seem daunting and unsettling to many, Adams maintains that a transient lifestyle feels comfortable to her. “It’s all sort of convoluted, but it works for us,” Adams says of her and her spouse, Chris. “I just love to travel. When I’m out of a suitcase is when I feel most normal.”
To live a global life as a married person obviously requires a like-minded, adventurous companion, and Adams has found that in her husband. “He owns a company in the Philippines that is an outsourcer for special projects for airlines,” she says. “That has morphed into him getting his pilot’s license. We both just love to travel so it works out well.”
Though she didn’t formally pursue writing until her post-grad days, a passion for writing was within her from an early age and has played a large role in her family’s life. “My mother Cathy is an author, my aunt is an author, my grandmother was a newspaper reporter and my other aunt was an author,” Adams says. “I grew up with these Southern women who were very fond of the written word and very fond of the English language. They were always big readers and big writers, and I take my influence from them and am very grateful to them. I always thought I’d be a writer, but I wasn’t sure until grad school that I knew I wanted to do magazine work—I knew I wanted to write. I’ve always kept journals and written stories.”
In addition to her writing, Adams brings an added skill to her freelance projects as she has become an accomplished photographer. “I was
in New York, and I took an ‘Intro to Photography’
course at the School of Visual Arts,” she recalls. “A lot of editors would ask, ‘Do you have a picture of this one thing we’re asking you to write about?’ I basically took that class and then taught myself. Now, I can shoot my own stuff, which makes me more valuable. And I really love it—it’s become a huge passion of mine. I’m obsessed with cameras and photography.”
So, which of her two talents holds the most importance to Adams or is it 50/50? “I’m a writer all day,” she says without hesitation. “I love photography, but photography is hard for me whereas writing comes naturally. Photography is a lot of math, distance and numbers, and I’m a word person. I don’t do well during tax season. For me, photography is cool because it’s hard. The more I learn about photography, the harder it gets. I’m fascinated by it, but I’m not naturally gifted at it.”
Given that her occupation goes hand-in-hand with her passion for travel, I ask Adams if her trips foster her projects or if the projects dictate her trips. “Typically, I pitch a story to my editors about a place I’ve already been that I want to write about, and then they agree to that, or I will say to them that I have an interest in going somewhere and they will send me,” she explains. “The latter doesn’t happen as much these days with budget cuts. They used to say, ‘Hey, we need a feature on Key West. We’ll send you down there and pay for everything.’ In modern times, I get myself there, and I start selling before and during the trip. I’m headed to Istanbul this spring and, once I booked my flight, I started reaching out to tourism boards and hotels to get everything lined up. If you’re buying your own plane ticket, then you have more autonomy in how you want to set up your schedule.”
Despite the exotic locales that she has visited, Adams still has a list of places she wants to see one day. “I would like to do some more work in South America,” she says. “I’ve been to Bogota and Bolivia, but I’ve never been to Argentina, Chile or Patagonia. We would also like to go to Estonia and Norway, so those are on the radar.”
But for now, Adams is happy to call New Orleans home. “We just bought a house, and we have a new dog. Everybody’s an artist of some sort, and it’s super colorful.”
