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Creative Writing Workshop
at the Paris American Academy
July 1st through the 28th, 2006
I’ll be teaching an intensive, month-long creative writing workshop this summer at the Paris American Academy. College credit is available for this hands-on English-language writing program, which includes courses in:
In addition to taking classes and amassing writing portfolios, students will participate in one-on-one critiques with professional writers (inlcuding myself), give readings in Parisian bookshops, and receive "survival" French lessons. Other instructors include O. Henry Award-winning author and playwright John Biguenet, and novelist Lauren Grodstein.
Between classes and tutorials, there will be ample time to experience the city, attend cultural events, visit museums, learn history, take day-trips to the countryside, read books, hang out in cafes, dance by the Seine, and make friends from around the world.
For more information, including costs and course descriptions click my Paris American Academy page here.
To receive an application, email an inquiry to info@pariswritingworkshop.com.
The Paris American Academy is located in the heart of the Latin Quarter, on the rue Saint Jacques, a block from the Luxembourg Gardens, and less than a mile from the Seine and Notre Dame cathedral. Class size will be limited to 20 students, and slots are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Above: The Paris American Academy, in the heart of the Latin Quarter
Above: Rolf on magazine assignment in Crete.
I have a brief story, entitled “An Olympian Paddle”, in the current issue of Islands Magazine. Set in Greece, the story details a 75-mile kayaking journey I took along the southern coast of Crete last fall. Though the Islands website doesn’t doesn’t contain full-length stories, the issue should be available at most newsstands and libraries.
“In order to vagabond, give yourself as much time as you can afford. Bankroll your trip with as much of this treasure as you can, whether you measure it in hours or in months. As a vagabond, time is your capital and life is your collateral. With enough time, you finally stop counting and saving it. You can begin spending it more freely without a sense of risk, without making judgments on how you spend it. While you live, there is always time for adventures both grand and mundane.”
–Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in the USA (1980)
The following essay, written by novelist Michael Mewshaw, was first presented as the plenary address at the 2004 South Central MLA Conference in New Orleans on October 28, 2004. It was included this year with the orientation materials for the Key West Literary Seminar, and I share it here with the intention of giving it a wider audience online.
By Michael Mewshaw
I’ve traveled here to New Orleans from London, where I spend part of each year. And most of you have traveled some distance from your homes and universities so that I can lecture and you can listen to a lecture about travel writing. At first blush this might seem a dubious topic, or at any rate a lightweight one for a Modern Language Association meeting. But in the course of the coming hour I hope to persuade you that travel, far from being a frivolous diversion best left to the yokels on Bourbon St. with their ball caps, beer cans and zany tee shirts, is in literary terms a crucial act.
First, of course, we must define our terms! According to some critics and cavilers, travel no longer exists. It’s all been replaced by the plague of tourism. And tourism, we’ll have to concede, ranks just below racism or pedophilia on the Politically Incorrect Index. We may do it but we don’t like to admit it. We would all prefer to be authentic travelers, not tourists, if only we could.
But it is my contention — and one of my themes tonight — that travel in the traditional sense is still possible and moreover, it is important for writers and thus to readers. Just as religious faith has lingered on long after the alleged death of God, and just as writers have continued to produce novels long after the much-discussed demise of that genre, people still do scuttle around the globe, reenacting rituals that were supposed to have died off ages ago. At the most basic level, they do so, it seems to me, in order to enjoy what poet Wallace Stevens called the pleasures of “merely circulating.” Perhaps because immobility reminds us of that ultimate fact of life — i.e. Death — we remain eager to prove we’re still alive by moving around and rubbing up against our fellow travelers. Seen objectively, many of us appear to have been hard-wired to follow migratory patterns that lead not just to a destination but to a condition in which “discovery” remains a potential reality even in places where masses of human beings have proceeded us.
The good doctor Freud speculated that “a great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfillment of these early wishes to escape the family and especially the father.” In that sense, travel may be viewed as a rebellious, even a subversive act, part of the process of self-actualization I travel to define and assert my existential identity. I travel. Therefore I am.
“Travel is not just a great education, but most of all it teaches you how little you know when you’re very far away. When I make physical journeys in the world, what I try to do is to choose those places that will most contradict or at least compliment reality as I know it in California.”
–Pico Iyer, from “A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World”, a speech given at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 5, 2006
Above: Korean condom packaging.
The above snapshot of a box of Korean condoms is a relic of Newley Purnell’s recent trip to Seoul. Newley’s brief commentary says it all:
There is so much to analyze on this box of Korean condoms that I don’t even know where to start. The copy on the box reads:
“Keep it real. Keep on faith. Keep on going. Piece! Stay real! WE are all brack people.”
Also, what’s up with the panther and the cat-woman?
More outtakes from Newley’s Korea trip here.
Earlier this week, Word Hum posted “Truth in Oxiana“, an excellent essay by Tom Bissell about the line between fact and fiction (and the implications of “truth”) in travel writing. Bissell’s essay, which was originally a speech given to Bennington College’s low-residency MFA students in early 2004, speaks so well on its own that I won’t belabor things with analysis here.
I will, however, present an outtake as a teaser:
Let us be straight about this. There is no such thing in the brute, unfeeling world as a story. Stories do not exist until some vessel of consciousness comes along and decides where it begins and ends, what to stress, and what to neglect. Story, then, is the most subjective force in the world—but I do not mean this in the Gallic, po-mo sense that all experience is relative and there is no such thing as truth. I believe fervently in truth, particularly literary truth, and great nonfiction writers are men and women who work to find that truth and, through the force of their argument and their use of detail, convince us that truth exists. Great nonfiction writers are priests of truth, who, moreover, have to struggle to find it, because truth is often frightening or upsetting; it is almost always surprising. Journalists such as Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair believe they already know the truth, and write accordingly. They cynically manufacture detail to tell us what they already believe. A great nonfiction writer takes the lumpen stuff of human experience and transforms it into a truthful story that may not cohere exactly to what happened, because what literally happened is not always the best illustration of the truth. For instance, a newspaper writer tells us that two psychopaths murdered a family in Kansas. Is that the truth? Yes, but truth is many fathoms deep. Truman Capote, on the other hand, takes us into the lives of the murderers and the murdered, leaving readers flayed by the mysteries of human morality and existence.
Bissell’s full essay online here. Elsewhere on World Hum, writer Michael Shapiro weighs in on the issue as well, citing the travel writers he interviewed for his book A Sense of Place.
“Sophisticated travelers, and not a few scholars of tourism research, tend to cringe at the idea of mass tourism, associating it with superficial encounters and hardships foisted upon local communities. …Still, many of our attitudes related to mass tourism have more to do with our own expectations and prejudices than they do with impacts upon local populations.”
–Erve Chambers, “Can the Anthropology of Tourism Make us Better Travelers?”, NAPA Bulletin 23 (2005)
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Reviewed by Tom Davis
Paul Theroux’s most recent travel narrative, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
The other form of travel—the form through which Theroux traverses Africa—reminds us that “travel is transition.” It’s the type of travel that requires “going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and passport,” the whole time “being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.”
This in mind, the reader of Dark Star Safari should brace himself like Theroux does: for moments of happiness along with all the expectations of misery, encountering the picturesque while expecting the appalling.
Dark Star Safari is in great part Theroux’s own story of his relationship with Africa. As a young man serving in the Peace Corps during the early 1960s, Theroux worked in Malawi as a teacher. It was during that period that the author “got a glimpse of the pattern my life would take”; to Theroux “Africa, “for all its perils, represented wilderness and possibility.”
Thus, when the author returns to visit his old school, he returns in anticipation of a happy reunion with the place he associates with his youthful aspirations. Unfortunately, what he discovers upon his return bears a disheartening contrast to the place of his youth. Theroux feels like “a wraith from the past, knocking on broken windows with my bony fingers, pressing my skull against the glass and looking death’s-head toothy, and saying, Remember me?” At times like this, Dark Star Safari reads like a man looking up an old friend after years of absence, and decrying, “I managed to keep myself in shape! How could you have let yourself go like this?”
Theroux is reflexively critical if anything, which is why he has the distinction of being one of the most insightful – yet dyspeptic – travel writers out there. In a 2003 article, the New York Times Book Review observed that Theroux has “a skeptic’s instinct for deflating myths, bringing irony to an essentially romantic form.” Other readers of Dark Star Safari have accused him of being everything from a post-colonial imperialist to a “hater” of aid-workers and missionaries. Indeed, the book does strike hard at the corrupt, beggarly state of many African nations — as well as the hypocritical, self-righteous behavior of do-gooders who travel to Africa under the auspices of humanitarianism or Christian philanthropy.
That said, however, Theroux is most successful in Dark Star Safari when he focuses on his “travel is transition” methodology, pointing out its power to soften the effects of globalization on individual Westerners and Africans alike.
In a 2004 radio interview, Paul Theroux suggested there were things individual Westerners could do to help in Africa:
I would say go to [that place you want to affect] first, walk around. Have your b.s. detector finely calibrated and then go to a village, go to villages, travel around, talk to people, ask questions about the government. In other words, before you do something, pre-ramble the territory and see what they need. Actually, I think what people need doesn’t come from the outside; it has to come from the inside.
I’m not so sure that this statement offers a complete solution to the world’s current situation so much as it suggests how long-term travel (as well as reading travel narratives) can, in a small way, inoculate travelers against the jading hype of mass-media culture. Near the conclusion of Dark Star Safari Theroux observes:
Huck never returned from ‘the Territory’ [. . .]. Captain Gulliver went home, wiser but also alienated and revolted, not by the trip but by the domestic scene [. . .]. Travel had changed him. You go away for a long time and return a different person—you never come all the way back. Like Rimbaud, you think, I is someone else.
Readers of Dark Star Safari will certainly relate.
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Note: Formerly a Sweden-based expatriate, Tom Davis teaches English at Wichita East High School in south-central Kansas. His review is part of an ongoing series featuring guest reviews of travel books on Vagablogging.net. Previously, Bill Jenkins reviewed Travels With My Chicken, by Martin Gurdon. To review a travel book for this site, send a proposal to Rolf at the contact address in the left index bar.
“You pass through places
and places pass through you
But you carry ‘em with you
on the soles of your travelin’ shoes.”
–The Be Good Tanyas, “The Littlest Birds Sing the Prettiest Songs” (2001)
Note: This lyric comes from a delightful song on The Be Good Tanya’s album Blue Horse
