Travel Writing with Heart: The Art of the Travel Essay and Memoir
Travel Writing with Heart: The Art of the Travel Essay and Memoir
A Four-Week Live Online Workshop with Brad Wetzler
Write powerful stories about the adventures of your life
So you're back home unpacking your suitcase after the adventure of a lifetime.
Your notebooks are crammed full of your observations, thoughts, and feelings scribbled down in cafes and on overnight trains. Your phone is loaded with photos.
But now what?
You’d love to tell the story in a way that brings readers on the journey with you. You want them to experience the outer journey—the natural beauty as well as the cultural sites—but you also want them to experience your inner journey, too. What you felt and thought. You want readers to understand why this trip mattered so much to you. And you want to share your insights and the hard-won life lessons you learned. Maybe your stories and travels can help somebody else understand their own life better
The tricky part is turning your experiences into writing worth reading.
How do you write something more engaging than merely a travel diary, that often dull, blow-by-blow rendering of what you did and saw? How do you bring the places and people alive so that the reader sees them through your eyes.
This is the work we’re taking on here.
During four weeks of lectures, discussions, assignments, and workshopping, you will create a vivid travel essay that accomplishes all of this. Each week, you and your fellow travelers will tackle writing assignments, read your portions of your stories out loud in class, and received expert editorial feedback.
Once week feeds into the next.
When we’re done, you’ll have a completed travel essay plus a clear grasp on how to write future essays that include a strong narrator, rounded characters, sizzling dialogue, and deep reflections about what your travels mean to you and perhaps others.
This class won’t be me talking at you the entire time.
Whether your travels have taken you to the high trails of Patagonia, the back roads of Kansas, walking the Camino de Santiago, a stint living abroad, the hiking trails in your backyard that you know by heart, or a weekend trip back to the town where you grew up, you’ll learn the same principles and techniques that the best travel writers use to bring place and people alive.
Why Learn From Me?
I got my start in 1990 as an editor at Outside magazine. Working there gave me the opportunity to learn from (and eventually edit) some of America’s finest travel and adventure writers. These writers helped shape how I understand traveling and telling stories about travel. Editing taught me the fundamentals of travel writing. I shepherded rough drafts through the process of becoming a published travel essay. I learned how to guide writers to construct tight, powerful ledes, write vivid scenes, craft scintillating dialogue, trim what didn’t belong, and find the bigger truths hidden in a story. That kind of training and experience? You can’t learn this in school.
Next, I left the editorial desk to become a freelance travel and adventure writer myself. I wrote about through-hikers on the Appalachian Trail. I stood next to the Greenland Ice Cap, covering the future of adventure and exploration. For the next thirty years, I took on one major travel assignment after another. India, Indonesia, Israel and Palestine, the Amazon, the Arctic, Russia, the Mexican Sierra Madre, Scandinavia, the Caribbean, and all across the American West. My writing appeared in Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Travel + Leisure, The New York Times, Men's Journal, Newsweek, Wired, GQ, Yoga Journal, and plenty of other outlets.
At some point along the way, I figured out some essential truths about travel writing. The best travel essays don't are built around characters you can’t forget, scenes that a reader can feel themselves inside, storytelling that feels genuine, dialogue that resonates in your body as true, close observations of places and people, and a writer who's in full control of the narrative, even if, at times, the adventures got a little out of control. These are the tools we're going to work on.
What You'll Learn:
During the workshop, we'll dig into how to:
•locate the real story hidden inside your travels
•unleash a vivid sense of place
•construct scenes readers can see and hear and feel
•write dialogue people believe
•shape characters that readers can’t forget
•build a narrator that readers trust and believe
•collect and arrange your field notes
•interview strangers and get them to open up to you
•fold history and research smoothly into your story
•uncover the deeper meaning below the surface events
•organize and revise an essay with confidence, and
•get your work ready for publication.
I'll also pass along many of the hands-on storytelling approaches I've built up during thirty-five years as a writer and editor.
How the Workshop Works
This operates as a workshop in the real sense. Each week, I'll offer a craft lesson and hand out new reading assignments. Between sessions, you'll write and refine your essay. When we gather again, you'll bring what you've written, read sections aloud, and get expert editorial responses from me and the group. You'll learn from your own hard work, from hearing other writers’s stories, and from the conversations we have in class.
When the course wraps, you'll have completed a travel essay. Not merely begun one.
Enrollment caps at twenty writers so everyone gets the chance to share their work and receive real feedback.
Weekly Schedule
Week One: Finding the Story
Every journey holds multiple possible stories. We'll pinpoint the one that most deserves your telling. We'll talk about how to begin a great story; how to write with curiosity and conflict. We’ll discuss locating the main question pushing your essay forward. Your assignment: write the opening of your essay.
Week Two: Bringing a Place to Life
Our attention turns to scene, dialogue, character, sensory detail, observation, interviewing, and building a strong sense of place. We'll also start reading student work aloud and talking through revisions. Your assignment: expand your essay through scenes and characters.
Week Three: Discovering What the Journey Was Really About
We'll discuss voice, theme, structure, and how the outer journey through the world connects to your inner journey. Plenty of writers realize during revision that the essay taking shape isn't really about the destination or the passport stamps. It's about something much deeper. We'll keep reading great travel writing and discussing student work. Your assignment: complete a full draft.
Week Four: Making Art from Experience
Our last class focuses on revision. We'll address pacing, structure, beginnings, endings, transitions, story compression, and how to make good editorial choices that turn a competent story into literature. We'll also use the final minutes of the evening to discuss publishing. I'll walk through what I've learned about crafting effective query letters, pitching editors, locating markets for travel essays, deciding whether a piece fits a magazine, literary journal, Substack, or memoir, and how to live and sustain the writing life after the workshop ends.
Schedule
Mondays: September 14, 21, 28, and October 5
2 pm - 4 pm p.m. Eastern Time
Tuition
Standard Workshop: $495
Includes four live online workshops, weekly writing assignments, expert editorial feedback, opportunities to read your work aloud, publishing discussion, additional resources, and a completed travel essay.
Premium Workshop: $1,095
This package includes everything in the Standard Workshop, plus four private 45-minute editorial conferences with Brad (one each week), personalized guidance on structure, voice, scene, revision, and theme, and individual publishing and pitching advice. Enrollment for the Premium option caps at six writers.
Who This Workshop Is For
This workshop is for anyone wanting to write more deeply about place and travel. You don't need stamps from six continents. Some of the best travel essays ever written happen a few miles from home. This class is also a great fit memoirists, essayists, journalists, travelers, adventurers, and anyone who has been itching to finally tell the story of that journey that changed your life.
About Brad Wetzler
Brad Wetzler is the author of Into the Soul of the World and has spent more than thirty years writing and editing stories about travel, adventure, memoir, and the search for meaning. A former senior editor who spent 19 years on the masthead as a contributing editor at Outside magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, Travel + Leisure, Newsweek, Wired, GQ, Men's Journal, Yoga Journal, George, and many other publications.
Today, Brad works as a memoirist and essayist, memoir writing coach, developmental editor, and teacher. His workshops blend the rigor of literary journalism with the emotional depth of memoir. He helps writers uncover the stories hidden inside their journeys, he teaches the craft to tell these stories well.
Join Us
Ever journey gives us story that lives inside us. And if you've been wanting to write yours, I'd love to help you bring it to life.