English 523/423 Questions of Travel
T / TH 2:00-3:15
Spring 2003
Greg Martin
Office: Humanities 257
Office Hours: M 2:30 – 4:30 TH 3:30 – 5:00 and by appointment
Phone: 277-6145
E-mail: gmartin@unm.edu
Course website: www.unm.edu/~gmartin
There are too many waterfalls here…
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
Elizabeth Bishop, from “Questions of Travel”
This is a writing workshop that focuses on the intersection between memoir and travel, and how in the travel memoir, as opposed to travel writing as literary journalism, the subject is not only place but also the self. How does travel, itself, shape identity? How do specific places alter us? How do both memory and forgetting shape us, and shape our writing about real places, lives and events. We will explore that blurred boundary where memory is both fiction and truth, and so where memoir is necessarily both truth and invention. And we will explore the boundaries between genres: between memoir, history, anthropology, etymology, philosophy, neurology… What are the important values of these categories? What are their limitations? We will explore the obligation memoirists have to drama and to real lives and real places: to their subjects, and to their readers. And in all this, we will explore how craft technique informs and guides. Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, writes that one task of the memoirist is the following of thematic design, of pattern and order, through one’s life. We will be seeking those patterns, attempting to make larger sense, to see how our personal lives participate in the human condition.
Over the semester, each member will write and workshop two pieces of memoir, one of which will be be revised and turned in during exam week. My hope is that the course will push you stylistically and technically, and encourage you to take emotional risks, to write what you could not have written before, to raise your standards for what you consider good writing, and then to meet those standards through the development of the habit of art.
More so than in the fall semester memoir course, this spring memoir course will emphasize close reading and reading about a particular theme (travel), and how reading like a writer differs greatly from the way we’ve read in the past. We will deliberately emulate, imitate, and steal, and we will discuss published works for their craft merits, so that we may broaden our sense of what can be done in our own writing—so that we might emulate, imitate and even steal. And just as importantly, we will discuss the flaws, as we see them, of the published works, so that we might better learn what we don’t want to do. Elmore Leonard said, “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” What would you leave out? Why? What would you develop?
Two memoir drafts, (20% each or 40% of your grade). Each of these pieces will be workshopped in class, according to a schedule that we will devise together.
Important note #1: the writing that you turn in to workshop does not need to follow the theme of the course. It must be, in some recognizable way (more on this) memoir, but it does not necessarily need to be a travel memoir, and it does not necessarily need to be only memoir.
Important note #2: Some of you are working on booklength projects, and so will not be turning in pieces that stand alone at 10-25 pages. Good. If so, make sure to provide at the beginning of your workshop submissions a single spaced paragraph or so of the background your readers will need to give you feedback.
Important note #3: Some of you may want to turn in, for your second workshop submission, a revision of your first workshop submission. That's just fine. (Some of you may not. That's fine too.) If you do turn in a revision for your second piece, it must be substantially revised. See Notes on Revision.
One revision (20% of your grade. Due at the end of the semester.) Note: Revisions should also include original drafts with my comments.
Important note #4: Some of you may want to, again, revise the same first piece a third time for this final revision. Fine. But again, it must be substantially revised.
Peer Responses: (10%) 1 page, typed, responses (approximately 250 words) for each of your peer’s manuscripts submitted for workshop. These peer responses are to be distributed to me, and to the author of the workshopped piece, on the day the work is discussed. These responses should focus on what you take to be one of the work’s compelling craft features.
Reading Responses: (20%) 1-2 page, typed, responses for each of the courses’ required readings. Again, these responses should focus on what you take to be one of the compelling craft features.
Important note #2: Late peer responses and reading responses will not receive credit, with one exception for each.
Craft Annotation: (10%) This is essentially an expanded reading response, where instead of analyzing one craft feaure closely, you will analyze several craft features. The idea is for you to become deeply familiar with the techniques of a work that you greatly admire. Graduate student minimum: 8 pages double-spaced. Undergraduate minimum: 5 pages double spaced.
Try to think of the workshop as a tentative process of helping the writer make this piece better, or as is often the case, make a future piece better. Everything we say will be wrong, or partial, or skewed by our own aesthetics. You will hear startlingly different analyses of your work from the class. Writing is not democratic, and you can’t possibly listen to all the voices in the class. Go away from the workshop with the reading that is most helpful to you. Choose, as your favorite critic in the class, the peer who seems most in sympathy with your work. Then make friends with that person, get together outside of class, share your work, and drink caffeine. Good workshops always extend beyond the classroom.
1. Manuscripts are due at specific times. You need to deliver copies of your work, for each of your peers and for me, one week before you are to be workshopped. There is little or no flexibility in this scheme. The workshop’s effectiveness depends on the timely distribution of your work. Late essays will not be workshopped.
2. Essays should be typed, double-spaced, numbered, with one inch margins, on one side of the page, with no cover pages, and bound by a paper clip or binder clip. Also include: your name, the course number and section, my name, the date, the title.
3. Correct grammar, usage, punctuation and spelling are expected. A piece flawed by pervasive proofreading or mechanical errors will be graded down.
4. Attendance and participation are mandatory. If you miss class more than twice it will affect your grade—the more absences, the greater the effect.