CWWR 952 - Creative Travel Writing
Course Description
"What am I doing here?" was the late travel writer Bruce Chatwin's guiding question. Creative travel writing, as practised by such noted writers as Bill Bryson, Mary Morris, and Paul Theroux, is more than a catalogue of places visited, buses missed, and cathedrals toured. It is the story of the author's relationship to place; it is both outer and inner journey. In this workshop you will be taken through exercises designed to trigger memory, sharpen your powers of observation, and create travel stories and articles using techniques borrowed from the craft of fiction: characterization, description, dialogue, etc. Beginning writers are welcome.Who Teaches CWWR 410?
Jessica Westhead
Jessica is an author and editor who has been speaking about creative writing and working with aspiring writers since 2005. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards, selected for the Journey Prize anthology, and nominated for a National Magazine Award. Her short stories have appeared in major literary journals in Canada, the US, and the UK, including Hazlitt, The New Quarterly, Geist, Maisonneuve, Indiana Review, and Hamish Hamilton’s Five Dials. She is the author of the novel Pulpy & Midge (Coach House Books) and the critically acclaimed short-story collections And Also Sharks and Things Not to Do (Cormorant Books). And Also Sharks was a Globe & Mail Top 100 Book, one of Kobo’s Best Ebooks of 2011, and a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Short Fiction Prize. Jessica's new novel Worry, published by HarperCollins Canada in 2019, was included on CBC Books’ Best Canadian Fiction of 2019 list and the CBC Canada Reads 2020 longlist.
Sample Course Outline
Distance Course Outline (subject to change)Notes