ARLET 905/Writing Practicum-- Creative Non-Fiction: Travel Writing Sandra Jamieson

The Course	Course Logistics	Creative Nonfiction.	Writer's Workshops
Your Writing	Reading Assignments	Travel Writing	Resources
Expectations	Writer's Notebook	Your Professor	Useful websites
	Course Schedule

There was a time when some of the greatest writers wrote essays, but in the latter part of the last century the form came to be seen as lesser than fiction and poetry.  Easier.  More pedestrian.  The stuff of "the media" rather than art.  In the last few years, though, the form has begun to regain its former stature and has achieved even greater popularity.  Courses that were once just called "The Essay" or "The Article" have been renamed "creative nonfiction" as an acknowledgment that nonfiction is no less creative than fiction.  Not only are essays gaining more respect from new readers, but book length works of creative nonfiction are being recognized as being stylistically compelling as well as informative. 

This section of ARLET 905 focuses on one form of creative nonfiction: the short article.  There are many different types of articles, and many different venues for publication.  This course generally focuses on the most popular types of articles to be found in magazines and as features in newspapers:  narrative stories, brights, how-tos, local color articles, profiles, backgrounders, human interest stories, and interviews.  Each of these requires a slightly different style and preparation, and all require you to think about audience, purpose, format, and structure in ways that writing personal essays does not.  This semester, I hope to help you strengthen those same skills, but as part of a course focusing on one genre of creative nonfiction article: the travel essay.

Perhaps the first task for a travel writing course is the definition of travel writing, and of the traveler.  The next task is to distinguish between essays and articles.  Such definitions contain many gray areas, and I hope your definitions will evolve over the course of the semester.  Some authors claim that there are no more travelers: that we are all tourists now.  Perhaps that is true, but there are still different kinds of tourist.  Perhaps the distinction can be made not so much on the basis of why we travel, but on the basis of what we do when we travel.  Can a "tourist" stereotypically defined write travel essays?  I think probably not.  Do travelers by definition write travel essays?  Not at all.  The majority of guidebooks and "how to" articles ("How to get to Cancun as cheaply as possible," "How to survive in France on $2 a day," and so on) written for tourists are written by travelers who are familiar with the place in question and have learned the art of travel.  Sadly, perhaps, while their work is really useful and often very well written, it helps to keep many people at the level of tourist because it "saves" them from ever having to leave their comfort zones or confront the "risk" of being lost.  Indeed, it removes the sense of risk that is at the heart of all traveling--whether one is going to the town next door or to a country whose name one cannot pronounce.  Perhaps for this reason, you will not be writing a "how-to" article in this class.  But you will write essays that reflect many of the skills and techniques that can be used for traditional articles, so if you want to make a living as a travel writer when you graduate you should learn some useful skills here (and there are plenty of "how-to" books that might help you on a more practical level).

In this section of 905, students will practice writing several kinds of articles; however, all of those articles will have something to do with travel.  Travel writing encompasses familiar journeys as well as the more exotic form of this genre, because travel writing is as much about the author as it is about the location of the journey.  We are always traveling somewhere, and those journeys all provide excellent material for travel writing. Some essays may strive to make the unfamiliar and the strange accessible to readers, but others may render the seemingly familiar strange and new, allowing us to see things differently.  Students may write several articles on aspects of the same journey, or they may explore the notion of travel in less traditional pieces or to less traditional destinations. 

In How to Make a Living as a Travel Writer, Susan Farewell observes: "One of the best ways to become a good travel writer is rather obvious: Read a lot.  Read in the bathtub, read while you eat (not the shredded- wheat box), read on the subway, read while you sit in traffic, read before you go to sleep, read on the stairmaster.  And be selective about what you read" (15).  In this class I have been selective for you, assigning readings each week that represent a variety of ways to achieve a specific goal. The essays I have selected are intended to provide you with ideas, not models.  They address different topics and adopt different styles, and they have already been critiqued and edited, so they will provide us with an opportunity to assess the success of their strategies.  You might suggest some of those strategies to your classmates, or decide to try some yourself.  Either way, you should think of them as glimpses of the possible as you develop your own voice and discover how to read and respond to the writing of others. 

While I understand that you might have work to do for your other classes, I also share Farewell's definition of what it takes to be a successful writer--of any kind.  To that end I have provided a list of other resources, both online and in print form.  If you plan to write more than one essay about a specific place, read fiction and poetry about that place as well.  Listen to its music and language and eat its food to help you immerse yourself in the sounds, smells, tastes, and rhythms of the place.  But read all the time!

The texts required for the class are:
The Best American Travel Writing , 2000. Ed. Bill Bryson. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). 
The Best American Travel Writing , 2001. Ed. Paul Theroux. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). 
Janet Ramsey.  Feature and Magazine Article Writing. (This valuable book is out of print.  I will 
         make copies of the material you need to read.) 

Optional Texts:
The Writer's Handbook, 2003. Waukesha, WI: Kalmbach, 2003.

By all means feel free to purchase other books as well--be they recommended by me or not!

You will write eight original essays for this class, and select four of them to revise for a final portfolio that will be graded at the end of the semester.  The portfolio will be introduced by a brief essay in which you discuss the nature of travel writing, your writing, travel, or whatever seems to you to set the stage for the essays in the portfolio.  Each week I will assign one or more essays for you to read along with material discussing a specific kind of article/essay.  The syllabus includes a brief discussion of each reading as it relates to the essay assigned for the week, and a brief discussion about what you should try to accomplish in the assigned essay.  The topic and theme of the essay are up to you.  You may write several essays about one place or one trip, or you might write each about a different place.  The choice is yours.  You may decide to include images as part of the essay, although typically articles include images and essays rely on words to capture the sense of the place (with the exception of "photo essays").

You should also keep a Writer's Notebook as part of this course.  If you don't keep even an occasional journal, get into the habit this semester!  A Writer's Notebook is not a diary, although it can share some features with a diary.  It's purpose is not to record everything that happened; only everything that you might use in an essay, a story, or a poem.  Some writers use the Writer's Notebook as a place to practice writing exercises--written "doodles" that may be used in a piece of writing one day or may simply sharpen the writer's powers of description, narration, recorded dialog, etc.  In this class I will suggest some Writer's Notebook exercises for you to do at home, and we will do some in class, but you should also use the Notebook to write down anything that might be useful later.  A phrase you overhear.  The way the light shines on the side of a building.  The sound of children laughing. The sound of a cat crying.  Chalk on a blackboard.  The smell of the commons.  The feeling of lettuce in your mouth as you chew it.  Be like a magpie and collect shiny things in the treasure trove that is your Writer's Notebook!

Like all writing, travel essays must be edited and revised, so in addition to asking you to read examples of different kinds of essays and write your own, this course will also teach you the basics of developmental and copy editing and give you an opportunity to practice them. To help you practice recognizing successful strategies and suggesting revisions, the course will be run as a writer’s workshop.  This means that in every class we will read the writing of other members of the class, discuss those articles, and write out and discuss suggestions for revisions.  The last three weeks of the semester will be purely revision weeks with no new essays being written.

What is a Writer's Workshop?:  A workshop is a place you take something to be fixed, so the idea of "workshopping" a piece of writing can be a little intimidating.  There's that image of a bunch of mechanics with wrenches about to take your work to pieces and remake it as they think it should be--or declare it beyond hope; fit only for the junk yard.  If you have that image, dismiss it.  A writer's workshop should be a place where you take your writing so that you can observe other writers and readers at work.  It allows writers to listen to the reactions of readers: their interpretations, confusions, concerns, envy,  praise, and moments of delight and sadness.  The workshop allows writers into the minds of their audience as its members read, and is thus an invaluable tool for writers of all levels.  Effective participants do not tell the writer what to "fix," or even what "works" -- these are mostly personal responses.  Effective participants do tell the author what worked for them, and, more important, they try to work out why specific things worked so that the author and the other participants can do more of that.  A workshop, in short, is a place where writers talk to other writers about their writing.  It is not a place of competition but a place of exuberance.

Because this class is designed to help you develop your article writing skills, I will only grade final drafts of articles (the four articles in your final portfolio).  Work MUST be handed in on time, though, because the workshops depend on your preparation.  Out of respect for your fellow writers, you MUST also attend each class.  Any less is an insult to whoever's work we are discussing that day, in addition to being a lost learning-opportunity for you.  I assume I can trust you to do this without the threat of punitive grades, but if I find that my assumptions are incorrect, rest assured that I will dream up some dire and awful punishment! 

I assume I also can trust members of the workshop to treat each other with the respect and empathy that all writers need.  This means both that each member respects each other member’s writing, and that each member does whatever is in his or her power to assist the other members of the workshop in revising their work.  If you are not in this class to learn to be a more effective writer, I hope you will leave rather than forcing me to design exquisitely appropriate tortures for those who transgress the rules of normal civility and writerly trust.