Schedule
Week Zero–Prior to Departure
Readings Due:
- Read ASAP: Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel” (2010)
- Blogging Instructions
- Read on the plane:
- Patricia Clough, excerpt from Umbria: The Heart of Italy (under Readings tab)
- Ian Campbell Ross, excerpt on food and wine culture from Umbria: A Cultural Guide (under Reading tab)
Assignment Due–Tuesday 5/20 by midnight:
- Blog Post 1:
- For your first blog post, your goal is to craft a more individualized answer to the question Pico Iyer poses in his article “Why We Travel.” Why do you travel? Why are you traveling? Begin by engaging Iyer’s article, quoting and engaging points he makes that feel most relevant and salient to you. You are using Iyer here as a sort of jumping-off point. If you would like to engage more critically, that’s fine as well. The goal is to begin to answer that key question–why you travel–as both a response to Iyer, and an articulation of your own motivations. Conclude by forecasting a bit: what are your hopes for this trip? What kind of disposition do you want to bring to your travels? Who do you want to be? What do you want to see and accomplish? What do you want to learn? How do you want to change? As with all of your blog posts, write for an outside audience (don’t assume familiarity with Iyer, or the essay–so introduce them both), and add some images and links.
Week 1:
Monday 5/26: Fundamentals of Travel Writing—Place, Character, Self, and Story
Readings Due:
- Jonathan Lorrie, The Travel Writer’s Way, Chapters 1-4 [under Readings tab]
- Lindsey Tramuta, “The Untapped Region Where Italy’s Oldest Culinary Traditions Live On.” Afar (2018)
- Excerpts from Book of Delights, Ross Gay
Assignments Due:
- Journaling:
- Please complete one of the exercises from Chapter one (there are two prompts) and one of the exercises from from chapter 2. Be ready to share what you’ve written in class.
Wednesday 5/28: Travel Writing Genres and Writing about New Places
Readings Due:
- Travel Genres: An Informal Overview
- Audrey Ferber, “A Daughter’s Guide to Florence,” from The Best Women’s Travel Writing Vol. 12 (2020) [under Readings tab]
- Ingrid K. Williams, “36 Hours in Florence,” The New York Times (2016)
- “As a Woman, I Never Feel Safe Traveling Alone,” Alexa Abdalla
Assignments Due:
Blog Post 2: Due Friday, May 30 by noon
You have had the opportunity to explore some of what Spoleto and its environs has to offer, and also to reflect upon some fundamentals of travel writing, some key genres, and the complicated position you occupy as a traveler. Ahead of last Monday’s class, you wrote some brief journal entries on place and character. For this prompt, compose a 600-800 word essay that introduces your reader to Umbria framed through your experiences during our opening weekend and excursions up to this point. Attend carefully to not only to place and character, but to elements of self and story as well. Think intentionally–in relation to what a genre requires or affords–about how to fold in you or your past, how to incorporate others, how to find the right balance between showing and telling, how to frame the piece in terms of structure. Include details, let senses meld together in different ways (e.g. Hayley’s sound of yellow), help the reader see, smell, feel hear, etc. And thinking of genre, if you’re stuck, try framing your essay in a hermit crab form. We’ll brainstorm our approach in Wednesday’s class.
Week 2:
Monday 6/2
Readings Due
- Marcy Gordon, In Lardo We Trust, from The Best Women’s Travel Writing (2011) [available under Readings tab]
- Daniel Verdu, “The Italian Grandmas Going Viral with the Art of Making Pasta,” El Pais, 2022
- Ligaya Mishan, “What We Write About When We Write About Food.” (PDF file if necessary)New York Times Style Magazine (2022)
- Slow Food Manifesto, from Slow Food International
Assignment Due
- Journaling: In Class
Wednesday: 6/4
Readings Due:
- “Les Calanques” by Melissa Febos
- Samantha Schoech, “Sono Felice.” The Best Women ‘s Travel Writing (2017) [available under Readings tab]
- Diane LeBow, “A Bedtime Story,” The Best Women ‘s Travel Writing (2020) [available under Readings tab]
Assignment Due: Wednesday by Midnight
Blog Post 3: Culinary Experience
Choose a meal, food experience, or culinary moment from your time in Italy that surprised, delighted, challenged, or moved you in some way. For Marcy Gordon, it was the transformative first taste of lardo in Gubbio that made her “close her eyes and place it in her mouth as if receiving communion.” For you, it might be navigating Conad on little sleep, asking some seemingly kind Italian nonna where the eggs are.
In a post of 600-800 words, craft a piece that captures not just what you ate, but how the experience impacted you or revealed something new about food, culture, or yourself. Consider drawing on some of our food readings. The on-the-plane reading from Ian Campbell Ross offers a broad history of Umbrian cuisine; the Slow Food Manifesto’s call to defend against “the universal madness of ‘the fast life’ with tranquil material pleasure” might provide some inspiration. Or, you might take inspiration from Ligaya Mishan’s concluding sentiment when she writes: “For what is the point of reading about food or, for that matter, reading about anything at all: to look in a mirror, or through a window; to escape the world, or to discover it”
Use all your senses to transport readers to the specific setting and show your reactions through concrete actions rather than abstract descriptions. Consider the cultural significance of your meal and what it revealed about Italian values, community, or ways of life–and also how it plays alongside or against your own relationship to food. Structure is open–feel free to experiment– but an easy form to follow would be to frame this as a personal narrative with you as both narrator and character: open in the moment of the experience, build the cultural context and understanding, and close with reflection on how this food encounter will travel with you beyond Italy, transforming your ongoing relationship with food, travel, life.
Week 3: Travel Writing Today: Word, Image, Media—Travel Writing 2.0
Monday 6/9:
At this point in our trip, it’s important to focus more on writing and individual research and less on shared readings. During this final week, your own writing will be central to our work in class.
Research Due: Research travel writing in a range of newer media: travel blogging, vlogging, TikTok. What genres and practices are emerging? Where are you finding the most compelling content? Compose a journal entry offering a brief content analysis of a specific mode—you can focus on a specific creator, a specific genre, a specific platform. Reflect on what seems to be driving this content, who is the audience, and so on.
Assignment Due: Wednesday by the start of class
Blog Post 5: Tell the Story of your excursion in a travel essay of your choice employing your mode of choice (including social media). Think carefully about how you want to organize it and what genre you want to compose in. We will workshop the drafts / ideas in class.
Wednesday 6/11–Final Reflections, On Departure: Advice to Future Travelers, final journaling, Group Workshop
Assignment Due:
- Select 1 piece from this class that you think is a most likely candidate for inclusion in the final blog project piece due two weeks after the end of the program). Be prepared to share your ideas with the class and we will workshop in small groups. Also, revisit this material from Iyer’s “Why We Travel” article.
Final Project: For your final project in this course, you can can choose one of two paths:
First, you can significantly revise and polish a piece that you have written. Along with this revised piece, you will send an email to Prof. VZ with a brief reflection, noting where and why you revised, expanded, and cut. In this email reflection, describe how you employed travel-writing best practices as discussed in our early reading from The Travel Writer’s Way (week 1). You migh talso use the language of juxtaposition and integration to describe your writerly choices–where you decided to deepen and merge details into a coherent scene (integration) and where you used juxtaposition for contrast or for folding in personal, historical, or other cultural reflections alongside the experience itself. Please also discuss how you worked enhanced document design through image selection and placement and use of linking to outside information. This will be due Monday, June 30.
Second, you can draft a new essay with the theme “My Spoleto” (that doesn’t necessarily need to be the title). This essay would capture your experience over these past three weeks more broadly. As with the first option, you will send an accompanying email to Prof VZ reflecting on your work in the context of our readings from this course. Feel free to share a draft a week prior to the deadline for feedback.