How to Write a Travel Essay Led By Faith Adiele

Thursdays, March 3rd + March 10th, 2022 | 7:00 PM ET - 10:00 PM ET

Tuition | $100.00

Capacity: 20 Storytellers

“BIPOC are the most traveled (and the most visited) people on the planet. Every time we leave the house (if we have a house), we travel. And if we make it home safely, well, that’s the Hero’s Journey.” --Faith Adiele

Our communities have been traveling since we could walk, be it spending summers down south, out west, up north, back east or in the midwest, leaving home and road-tripping back, moving from working to middle class, im/migrating then visiting ancestral homelands, embarking on spiritual quests or roads to recovery, seeking a home between languages and cultures. And a good travel essay contains everything that good storytelling needs--complex characters, evocative settings, compelling voice, an understanding of history, and larger themes that reveal something new about our world. In How to write a Travel Essay led by Faith Adiele, storytellers will review different types of service and literary travel writing, as well as choose a structure to play with, practice craft and research tips, and discuss how to resist the colonial travel model. Participants will come away with the draft of a travel essay, plus a notebook of story ideas.

About the Faculty: Faith Adiele is a travel memoirist and founder of VONA’s Traveling While BIPOC, the nation’s first workshop for travel writers of color. Her media credits include two episodes of A World of Calm (HBO Max), the documentary My Journey Home (PBS), Ethical Traveler podcast appearances, and Sleep Stories (Calm app). Meeting Faith, her account of becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist Nun, won the PEN Open Book Award and routinely appears on travel listicles. She is co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology, and her essays on travel, food and culture have appeared in O Magazine, Off/Assignment, Flaunt, Essence, The Rumpus, The Offing and Best Women’s Travel Writing. She speaks and teaches around the world; visit her at adiele.com and @meetingfaith.

Partial and full scholarships are available. Email scholarship inquiries to Info@RootsWoundsWords.org. Explicitly state the scholarship (partial or full) you’re interested in.

Like all RWW offerings, this space is for Black, Indigenous, Latinx/e, Asian, and other Storytellers of Color only. BIPOC Storytellers are centered here, exclusively.