Why Go to Europe for a Writing Class?

Santo Stefano di Sessanio   Photo: Ciao Chow Linda

It's easy to see why an artist would travel to Tuscany to paint. It's not hard to see why a collector would sign up to treasure hunt in Morocco with a well-known jewelry artist. It's natural for a literature lover to join a travel-study group in London to study British literature.

But why travel overseas, or within the U. S. for that matter, just to write? True, a novelist writing a mystery set in the Paris sewers would need to be right in the muck for first-hand exposure. A travel writer whose essay is set in Barcelona needs to walk among Gaudi's wonders in person to sense the magnitude and the artist's amazing courage.

Surely, a memorist parsing teen years dedicated to escaping his alcoholic mother's grip needs to be in his own head. And his head functions as well at home in Philadelphia as it would in a small town in the South of France.

Or does it?

Wall Detail, Santo Stefano  Photo: Ciao Chow Linda

I've thought a lot about this question. Each year as people sign up for my workshops in Italy, I  contemplate their decisions to fly so far away to learn something they could learn at home. But during each workshop week in Italy , all of our lives are transformed in ways small and large. We find out things about ourselves we hadn't known we needed to know.

Firelight, Santo Stefano  photo: Ciao Chow Linda

It has something to do with  getting away from familiar ways of seeing that involve confronting a new and challenging perspectives. It has to do with the intent to focus that I've written about earlier. And it has to do with the forced seclusion of the enchanting, sparsely populated medieval town where the workshop has been held. 

It seems contradictory that a memoirist can access his or her personal history more readily far away from home where handy relatives can answer questions, where ancestral ephemera holds clues. But it happens over and over. 

The Heart of Memoir Workshop, Santo Stefano  Photo: Ciao Chow Linda

Work shopping and writing among other people who understand the task helps. Reading aloud and getting feedback helps. Meeting individually with an instructor helps. Focusing on a goal of composing so many words, pages and memories helps.

Mostly, critical access to personal knowledge results from the solitude a person can feel, even among a group of ten, in a place far away from daily distractions, a new place that challenges quotidian experience, a place where a stone floor below an antique bed emanates ancient soulfulness. It comes in a place where there's nothing to do but learn, progress, discover, wonder, wander and write.

That's why even the memoirist--intent on telling a childhood story--can often access personal narrative so much easier far away from the source of the experience. 

Rocca Calascio   Photo: We Love Abruzzo on Facebook

That's also why the stories in the medieval stones, in the Medici-decorated archways, and the night-time sound of howling wolves start to bleed into the memoirist's composition--because it's nearly impossible to be unmoved by the spirit of a place. 

~~~

If you want to discover your story among the vineyards of the Languedoc in the South of France, challenge your daily perspective while hiking to a castle in the midst of restoration, or become involved in a community of writers making sense of personal experience, join me for 

The Heart of Memoir Writing Workshop with France, In Other Words. There's still room for you and a few weeks left to sign up!