Writing Your Journey

Few things remind us so convincingly of the importance of writing as when we suddenly find ourselves in a new environment. Mere exposure to a new place (be it city or a country) activates senses. Ideas and observations rush in. Questions come up: why is this so? How is this different? Why do I find this unsettling? Maybe you can put these questions into a chatbot and see what happens. But a chatbot itself is not going to generate your individual human experience.

This course invites you to explore history and current debates on how humans captured their experience; what role technology (such as typewriter, computer, AI) played in ways we think about the world and our place in it. It is also an opportunity to practice some of the skills professional writers have developed. This includes studying how writers across times and spaces reflected on their own crossing of boundaries, being strangers in new cultures, and how they navigated belonging to multiple communities. It is not a conventional class, but rather a workshop that helps you, on a regular basis, learn to work with the new experience and unpack its different parts.

Through regular journaling, practical observation exercises, and group and individual brainstorming and woodshedding, we will practice techniques used by non-fiction writers. The course is not primarily aimed at preparation of future writers – although, maybe you want to be one. Here, our primary goal is to use writing to help you navigate your own sense of belonging, interpretation of new experience, and having feet on the ground in a world that seems to be constantly in flux.

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