Travel Writing in Pont-Aven, France: Program Details

Pont-Aven, France

The immersion setting and individual attention from faculty make this an ideal opportunity for students with significant writing experience as well as those looking to explore the discipline. The program is an intensive live-work environment that is often a bridge to new projects and ways of writing. For all of Pont-Aven’s beauty and history as an art community, it is also an ideal place for critical, contemporary dialogues to take place.

Along with its natural beauty, Pont-Aven offers an abundant variety of cultural and historical sites for students to explore. It hosts an outdoor weekly food market, is home to a local forest depicted in numerous stories and paintings, and was once home to the painter Paul Gauguin. The ocean, the Aven River, coastal cliffs, rolling hills, and nearby pre-historic sites are easily accessed, providing rich references for the assignments of the course.

Faculty

Catherine Watson is an award-winning travel writer, photographer and teacher. The former travel editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, she is the author of two collections of travel essays, Roads Less Traveled—Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth (Syren, 2005) and Home on the Road—Further Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth (Syren, 2007), both of which were Minnesota Book Award finalists.

Nationally, Catherine was a pioneer in voiced travel writing for newspapers, and her work has won many national and regional awards, including the two most important in her field: The Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year and the Society of American Travel Writers' Photographer of the Year.  Her writing has appeared in ten anthologies, most recently Best American Travel Writing 2008 (Houghton Mifflin), Best Travel Writing 2008 (Travelers’ Tales) and the forthcoming Best Women’s Travel Writing (coming from Travelers’ Tales in 2009).

She has taught writing at the University of Minnesota (in the departments of journalism, creative writing and continuing education) and at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Colorado State University in Fort Collins and The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. She is also an on-line mentor in the University of Minnesota's Split Rock Mentoring for Writers Program. Catherine returns to the Brown University campus in 2009 as an instructor for the Brown Writers’ Symposium in Providence.

Catherine Watson returns to Brown to lead this travel writing course.She says:

Traveling as a writer with an audience in mind – be it friends, family or a publication – sharpens all your senses. It makes you open to new experiences, which meansmore serendipities, more moments of insight. You will notice more about your surroundings and yourself, and you experience everything more intensely than on an ordinary vacation. Everything becomes vivid – place and people, light and color, music, conversations, the tastes and smells of food, architecture both great and humble, the range of history and of human connections. You get more out of the trip because, when you are writing, you are more fully IN it.

This program in travel writing offers a non-competitive setting and a supportive coach to help students experiment with the form, drawing on the riches of Pont-Aven and their own memories. Expect to emerge as better writers and better travelers.

In an ’05 interview with World Hum, Catherine summarizes her approach to travel writing:

  • Go everywhere you can.
  • Be passionately curious.
  • Talk to everyone who’ll let you, especially the quiet people.
  • Stay till the bitter end. If the ceremonial lasts all day, so do you—you never know what’ll happen at the end.
  • Be able to turn on a dime. Throw out your itinerary if something better comes along, and it always will.
  • Don’t sweat the small stuff—or the bad beds, or the bed bugs, or the wet shoes or whatever. The discomforts will pass, the shoes will dry, and the memories will last.
  • And maybe more than anything: Commit to the trip. Commit to the moment. Really be there.

Samples of Assignments from the Travel Writing Program

Picture a place that matters to you, whether at home or in Pont-Aven or elsewhere in the world, and revisit it from the point of view of each of your senses. Remember inner details as well: Why does it matter so much to you? 

Take a walk through Pont-Aven and write down every detail that strikes you. Or sit in a café and eavesdrop. (If you don’t speak French, eavesdrop with your eyes.)  How would you convey the walk or the café to readers who have never been there? Who may never be there? Which details would have most significance for them? And which reference points?

Imagine your audience:  To whom are you speaking?  What metaphors would you choose to convey a sense of Pont-Aven to, say, a close friend your own age? A sibling? Your mother or father? A grandparent? A total stranger? Do you automatically reach for different reference points, metaphors and details for each one? Why?

Write an irresistible first sentence about a place or an experience. Ask yourself, what does each kind of audience need to know next to understand it? And next? And next? How long a chain of irresistible sentences can you write? Where does it lead?

Seek the essence of an experience, whether from a current trip or a past one. When you picture it – when someone says “New York’’ or “Hong Kong’’ or, as they will soon, “Pont-Aven’’ or “Paris’’ –  what is the first image that your mind sees? Why is that image is always first?

The inward journey: In the places that most matter to you –  and ‘’mattering’’ is not the same as “liking’’ –  what did you learn about yourself? How did you learn it? Can you translate your personal discoveries into meaning for others?