Everyday Travel Tales:
Travel Essay/Memoir Workshop
Dates: 4 Tuesdays, Mar. 12 - Apr. 2
Time: 7 pm - 9 pm
Instructor: Faith Adiele
Ages: Adult
Genre: Travel Writing
Price: $245
We all travel, every day. Be it moving back and forth between language and culture; embarking on roots journeys or road trips; living as an ex-pat or multicultural family member; being a nomad; climbing from working to middle class; recalling our family’s escape/exile/emigration/immigration; leaving home or dropping out of college; setting out on pilgrimages or spiritual quests; going abroad to study/research/ witness/do reportage/volunteer; walking the road to recovery every day.
But how do we turn these (internal) cultural encounters or (external) physical journeys into gripping stories with deeper (social, spiritual, cultural, historical, political) meaning, stories that capture a particular culture and era, and move readers?
In this class we’ll use a combination of generative exercises, workshop-style feedback, and discussions of published works to uncover the travel stories embedded in everyday life. Craft lessons will focus on the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of compelling travelogues.
This class is appropriate for all levels of experience.
Faith Adiele is author of Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton), a memoir set in Thailand that won the PEN Open Book award and regularly makes essential travel listicles. She is also writer/narrator/subject of My Journey Home, a PBS documentary about her international family, and co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press).
Selected by Marie Claire Magazine as “One of 5 Women to Learn From,” Faith founded VONA Travel, the nation’s first writing workshop for travelers of color, and African Book Club in Oakland. She is a senior editor at Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, and her food writing has appeared in Best Women’s Travel Writing, Women Who Eat: A New Generation on the Glory of Food, Her Fork in the Road: Women Celebrate Travel & Food, and Go Girl! The Black Woman’s Book of Travel & Adventure.
A graduate of Harvard University, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, Faith is Associate Professor of Creative Nonfiction at California College of the Arts, where she teaches food and travel literature, creative nonfiction and contemporary African literature. She has worked as a social activist, Buddhist nun, college professor, and petty bureaucrat.
More about Faith: adiele.com.