Travel, dear student....
Go abroad with me.
I was not always a traveler. I was a home body. My mom had to bribe me as a child to be silent in the backseat of the car when we drove from Kentucky to Illinois to the bank. FROM KENTUCKY TO ILLINOIS.
“So looooong,” I would complain. “Do I HAVE to go?”
“ We’ll stop at Dairy Queen,” she would say.
That drive to the bank was all of about 15 minutes in 1970 something.
My first real hint of the coming love to travel was a sputtering start, when I went to Birmingham, Alabama for college. It was 6 hours away and I knew no one. This was a surprise to everyone that I would do such a thing. Unbeknownst to me, my dad, a community college administrator, held a schedule open for me at his college because he was pretty sure I would call within a week to come home, lonely, hungry and afraid.
It didn’t happen. I stayed. I interned. I got a job at “Southern Living” magazine. I was the assistant editor of food and travel trade publications. And, I got to travel. By myself. My second through one-hundredth plane rides were by myself. That will either make or break a 22 year old!
No doubt I liked to write. I kept a journal from the moment I learned how to write to now (the first draft of this here introduction occurred in a journal entry), but “Southern Living” taught me how to travel. Well, “Southern Living” and ever-patient parents in those short bursts of road trips.
The actual switch flipped all the way one summer day as I read Pat Conroy’s “Beach Music” on the front deck of my dad’s day cruiser boat on Lake Barkley in far Western Kentucky. When this line about Italy hit a sense in me that said “I want to write like that. I have got to see that in Italy.” Conroy wrote:
“To capture the sense of a place in each country I visit, I work hard at turning homesickness into a kind of scripture as I describe what the native-born cherish most about their own countries. Writing about Venice always represents a challenge. The city is a peacock tail unfurled in the Adriatic and the sheer infinity of its water-dazzled charms makes you long for a new secret language brimming with untried words that can only be used when describing Venice to strangers. Venice has always brought me face to face with the insufficiency of language when confronted by such timeless beauty. I’ve put in the hours trying to make the over-visited city mine and mine alone.”
The passage doesn’t even say a thing about Venice, but fiction or not, I had to see a place that inspired new words, a new language! Beyond that he also made me smell Rome! I smelled it! Just as Conroy and I both have a love for our native Southern Culture, born largely of food, I connect food and culture like he does. Just read this passage:
“In a short amount of time Leah became part of the native fauna around the Palazzo Farnese, a beloved romanina adopted by the people who loved and plied their trades around the piazza, and she rapidly turned into the first real linguist produced by my family. Her Italian was flawless as she navigated the teeming stalls along the Campo dei Fiori with its wild rivers of fruit and cheese and olives. Very early on, I taught Leah how to tell where we were in the Campo by using her sense of smell. The south side was glazed with the smell of slain fish and no amount of water or broomwork could ever eliminate the tincture of ammonia scenting that part of the piazza. The fish had written their names in those stones. But so had the young lambs and the coffee beans and the torn arugula and the glistening tiers of citrus and the bread baking that produced a golden brown perfume from the great ovens.”
What came about very slowly for me is now an obsession. One I enjoy bestowing on students. There is no higher high, no work that gains more satisfaction, no time I love college students more than when I take them abroad and show them how to write about it.
My biggest accomplishment, bigger than any award that could possibly be granted comes from this small tweet from a student, who went with my first class abroad. She sent this to me 10 years out from that trip. Bethany Keyser wrote:
“As I prep for my 11th international trip this week it hits me what a huge impact you had on my life! Thank you for your contagious love of travel and sense of adventure. You helped a bunch of college kids realize that the world was attainable and that being a traveler was a way of life. I still remember you saying to me 10 years ago that you live small so you can travel big. I live my life with that same motto and just want to say thanks!”
I think discovering new things, new cultures and writing about it is the biggest education a college student can have. It is an incredible honor to facilitate that when the world is their classroom.
Students have until December 1 to apply to the summer program in France. I will be teaching a class called “Bon Voyage and Bon Appetit: Communicating inward and outward journeys via multimedia storytelling in France.”
They have until October 1, 2020 to apply for the Winter term program in London. I will be teaching a class called “England in the Movies: Storytelling and Media-induced Tourism.”
