Travel awakens the mind. When we cross borders and cultures, discoveries we make can lead to profound breakthroughs. And now, with most of us not traveling, there has never been a better time to reconnect to our richest travel experiences and deepen our own understanding of them by committing them to paper. In this three-week generative workshop, Lavinia Spalding, award-winning author of Writing Away and six-time editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, invites you to gather the words to bring your travel stories to life.

In each two-hour session, we write together from innovative prompts, poetic passages, and photographs as we conjure “story slices” that serve as the seeds for longer narratives. We share our work in class and offer feedback as a supportive, curious community. We also read various short published pieces for inspiration and illumination. In focused craft sessions, we discuss bringing concentrated sensory attention to our writing, creating momentum, developing scenes, handling setting, making diverse characters come alive, utilizing metaphor, and more. We explore creative approaches to animate and enliven our prose as we compose evocative sketches of the people and places that have moved us—and in turn, we learn how to move readers.

We emerge from this dynamic course with not only fresh, powerful drafts and ideas, but also with a newfound capacity for creative expression and the heightened ability to identify our most compelling material.

This online workshop is open to writers and wanderers of all experience levels. Come with half-formed ideas or journal entries you would like to shape into essays, or photos and sketches that tell a story. Come with an open mind, a sense of wonder, and a few hours to lose yourself, once again, in some faraway elsewhere.