Course Details

Course offered Winter 2016

HONORS 345 A: Pilgrimages and Idle Travels: Travel Writing and Memoir (C)

HONORS 345 A: Pilgrimages and Idle Travels: Travel Writing and Memoir (C)

SLN 15175 (View UW registration info »)

Frances McCue (English)
Email: frances@francesmccue.com

Credits: 5
Limit: 22 students

Honors Credit Type

This course satisfies BOTH Honors Interdisciplinary AND UW's Composition requirements.
Reading, writing and traveling are all acts of the imagination. This course will allow us to “see” the places we’ve already visited, and imagine the places we plan on visiting. Our workshop will offer the memoirist and the returning traveler a way to synthesize experiences, transforming them into essays, articles, poems or stories. Our time together will help to set a practice for writing and exploring so that writing becomes a multi-modal practice to document life as it goes along.

Our goals include: helping you to keep a fantastic notebook/record of the sights, sounds, smells and impressions of the places you’ve visited and creating methods to transform that notebook into a more formal piece of writing. By reading poems, stories, essays and articles that illuminate the art of travel and of recording memories, we’ll test out a range of styles and stances. These activities will surface our initial assumptions about what it means to travel as a method of inquiry and imagination, and of acceptance, through places we don’t yet know– or places we have already been.