GCC Creative Writing

• What & Who: Travel Writing Workshop conducted by Renee Rivers
• When: Saturday, October 14th from 9:30AM to 11:30AM
• Where: GCC Main, Room LA-141
• Why: I mean, read the post. This sounds amazing!

Travel Writing is an area of writing that is open to everyone. Given the upsurge in travel and online publication possibilities with multiple audiences, travel writing opportunities abound.  Once the parlance of colonial adventurers and conquerors, this art form has been rightfully infiltrated by genre- and boundary-busting creatives, inter-cultural sojourners, and reflective writers to produce a flurry of stories that not only transport readers into other places and cultures, but in which any reader can find themselves whether they travel or not.

Some of today’s most sumptuous and widely read travel writing seeks to situate the individual at the center of the narrative and defines travel in wide-open ways. When travel asks us to show up and interact with new places, peoples and cultures, we are often challenged to understand our inner world in terms of the outer.

And that’s where story magic happens.

You x place x culture x your interests x your memories x some kind of new insight is where the intersection of exciting new travel narratives emerge. Consider how a story may come to life after visiting a neighborhood ethnic market triggers a childhood memory, or how a grandparent’s journal takes you on a search for cousins across the country, or how sensuous food can transport you into the realm of imaginary travel, or how your college engineering notebooks inspire a trip to university archives or another country to research the science and history of aeronautics, or even how a family vacation may have gone hilariously wrong.

These ideas represent a tiny peephole into the rich and ready domain of travel writing available to writers of all backgrounds today.

In this workshop you will participate in:

• exposure to many exciting expressions of travel writing
• creative ways to access authors and practitioners of this craft
• travel writing exercises meant to center you, your interests, and travel or every day experiences into a trip-tick for continued writing practices
• reflective writing that explores where your internal and external travels may take you
• finding travel writing and travel writing markets for your writing
• mapping out story ideas and how to craft them for potential markets

Renee G. Rivers’ interests can find her behind an acetylene torch, shooing urban chickens from her kitchen or traveling to remote locales.

She holds an M.A. in English from SUNY Brockport, a B.S. in Special Education, and B.A. in German via the Goethe-Institut–Muenchen.

Renee’s stories have appeared in: PBS Filmmaker Jillian Robinson’s Change Your Life Through Travel, Canyon Voices, and The Feminist Wire and have won international awards from SouthWest Writers and Tin House.

Renee currently writes about teaching in remote Alaskan villages, taking her father in a wheelchair to Mount Everest, and teaches First-Year Composition and Travel Writing at Arizona State University at the West Campus.