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The Writer’s Journey
“There, where the road ends, the real journey
begins.” Campbell McGrath
For most of us, Italy, like many European destinations,
is a place to savor great foods and historic locations.
We might walk the narrow streets surrounding the Campo
de’ Fiori, take snapshots of the Vatican or buy 
trinkets outside the Coliseum. But for American writers
from Herman Melville to Ernest Hemingway to Elizabeth
Bishop, travel has provided surprises, challenges and
inspiration. It is this search for inspiration and a
connection to a larger, global culture that brought a
group of Converse College creative writing students and
Professor Susan Tekulve to the vine-draped villas and
cobbled streets of Rome for a creative writing course in
travel writing.
Over a period of nearly four weeks in the summer of
2001, the Converse group studied Italian, practiced the
art of Italian cooking, visited many of the historic,
artistic and ecclesiastic monuments of Rome, visited
with other writers—and wrote.
“Most of us wrote some everyday,” said Converse
writing student Gabrielle Gray ‘03. “Professor
Tekulve would have conferences with us about the essays
we were writing in a local cafe over lunch.”
Tekulve, a published short story writer, essayist and
member of the English Department’s writing faculty,
explains that the group immersed themselves in the art
of travel writing before they even boarded the plane.
“We spent about six weeks in the classroom discussing
specific writing techniques and strategies, and looking
at different forms of the travel essay,” she says. “Because
these aren’t academic essays, but, instead, are like
the travel essays you might find in The Atlantic
Monthly or The New Yorker, the students had
to look at ways to use narrative and description as if
they were writing fictional short stories.”
The students wrote about everything from travels to the
Villa d’Este and its 16th century garden fountains, to
a memoir about being a Baptist-raised student attempting
to understand her first experience in a Roman Catholic
church.
“Travel writing is one of the oldest narrative forms
in existence,” Tekulve says. “When authors write
about other places and cultures, they begin to
understand their connection to a larger world, but they
also begin to understand their own hometowns, their own
culture. Living as an outsider, even briefly, can be an
awakening experience.”
 That
sentiment is shared by Tekulve’s husband, Professor
Rick Mulkey, Director of the Creative Writing Program at
Converse. “Travel isn’t only about the search for
pleasure,” says Mulkey. “The author Paul Theroux
calls himself an anti-travel writer. What I think he
means is that for writers travel isn’t just about
vacations, about the flavors and scents of a cafe or
restaurant. It is about the total experience. For
example, in 1993 we spent eight months living and
teaching Poland. Everything about that time was
beneficial because I don’t think we quite understood
what it meant to be an American writer until we lived in
another culture and discovered what other people desired
and needed, and what they thought of us as Americans.”
 Travel
study is nothing new to Converse College. As Mulkey
points out, the English Department has been very active
for many years in travel programs. “The course last
summer and Susan’s upcoming Winter Term course to
Tuscany with Professor Cathy West in the department of
Foreign Languages are not the first travel courses
offered through the English Department. Professors Karen
Carmean and Charles Morgan have participated in a number
of courses in recent years. For instance, Professor
Morgan is offering a literature course as part of the
upcoming London Term. But Susan’s courses are the
first creative writing courses offered in the travel
program. It is very important for our student writers to
have an opportunity to step outside their comfort zones.
The challenges provided by travel study and the lessons
learned by a writer who analyzes and deciphers her
experiences through the act of writing are priceless.”
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