You’ve probably spent time as an armchair traveler—loved being transported to another land and taken to another culture, just by someone’s well-wrought words. Why not transport readers with your own words to places you saw and loved? Why not write your own travel memoir?
Summon those places, recreate them, make them come alive once more. Taste that food, smell that sea, hear that mysterious music and that melodic new language again. Above all, bring back those people you met, givers of hospitality and laughter who befriended you and made their home yours.
Was it Italy? Japan? A long-ago summer as a student abroad? A recent cruise to the Caribbean? Whether Timbuktu or a national park, it’s all travel, and with the guidance of Richard Goodman, you bring the sights, sounds, and sensual times of your past trips to the page.
In addition to using exercises to retrieve details of people, places, and things, we read selections from inspiring travel memoirs. Feel free to stimulate your memory with photos from your travels—and, better yet, add them to your memoir.
What foreign lands have you fallen in love with? Been changed by? Learned life lessons from? You can return and take others with you when you put your carefully crafted words to paper. Join Richard on that journey.
This program is open to writers of all levels.
Class will meet 9:30 – 11:30 am (Mountain Time) on Tuesdays and Fridays starting October 24 and ending November 10 (six online group sessions). Enrollment is limited to 14 participants.
Zoom Video Conferencing software (available for no charge from Zoom.com) will be used to facilitate the class sessions. Further details will be emailed to registrants.
Santa Fe Workshops always aims to produce a high-quality experience for our online attendees. That said, variables including regional and local internet provider speeds, traffic on Zoom's servers, and your own computing hardware can contribute to a less than ideal streaming event. While we do our best to minimize the impact of these variables, they are outside the control of Santa Fe Workshops.
View Withdrawal and Transfer Policies for online programs.
For the convenience of participants, recordings of each class session are posted privately for one month after the end of each session. Santa Fe Workshops takes the recordings down after one month to protect the intellectual property of our instructors.
Richard Goodman is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France, which the San Francisco Chronicle said is “one of the most charming, perceptive, and subtle books ever written about the French by an American.” He is also the author of The Soul of Creative Writing, A New York Memoir, and The Bicycle Diaries: One New Yorker’s Journey Through 9-11. He is co-editor of The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing. He has published articles and essays in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Vanity Fair, Creative Nonfiction, Ascent, River Teeth, Hippocampus, Chautauqua, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Saveur. He has taught writing workshops in New York City, Louisville, New Orleans and Maine for the past thirty years.
Website: richardgoodman.org
