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Showing posts with label literary travel writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary travel writing. Show all posts

Sunday, May 28, 2017

Nature and Travel Writing in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park

El Capitan from the Pine Springs Station,
Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas
(This is a mirror post from my main blog, Madam Mayo.)

This past weekend for my workshops as artist-in-residence at the Guadalupe Mountains National Park I offered this handout which includes three brief, fun, easy-peasy and yet powerfully effective exercises to rev up your writerly perceptions.

We can think of the best writing about nature and travel, whether fiction or nonfiction, as instructions for the reader to form in his or her mind a "vivid dream," an experience of the world. How do we, whether as readers, or as any human being (say, folding laundry or maybe digging for worms with a stick), experience anything? Of course, we experience the world through our bodies, that is to say, through our senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing-- and I would add a "gut" or intuitive sense as well... CONTINUE READING

P.S. Loads more resources for writers on my workshop page.

> Some of my travel writing is herehere, and here.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Literary Travel Writing: Notes on Process and the Digital Revolution

Confession: After I snapped this photo with my iPhone I checked my email
-- just to see if I could! Alas, I could.]]

The aim of literary travel writing was-- and remains-- to bring the reader to deeply notice, that is, get out of her head and into the world of specific sounds, smells, tastes, textures, colors, ideas, histories, geographies, geologies... In the words of Kenneth Smith, "You have to open space, and deepen place."  >> CONTINUE READING AT MY MAIN BLOG, "MADAM MAYO"