575travel

Growing up, I always considered myself a writer. I’ve kept a journal for as long as I can remember, and spent my free time as a kid writing story after story. This was enriched by a special reading and writing program I participated in throughout elementary school and middle school, but by the time high school came around, I found myself forced into classes that hindered my creativity. With all of the other school work I had, I put writing in the back seat and lost a lot of the confidence I had as a writer.

 

Fast forward a few years into my time at the University of Michigan. I missed writing, and realized that it was something I wanted present in my life again. After learning about the Sweetland Writing Minor, it seemed to be exactly what I was searching for - an opportunity to improve my writing with a supportive community. I seized the opportunity to take classes that allowed me to write what I wanted to write, rather than just complete mandatory assignments that I finished just for the grade rather than for my love of writing.

 

In my Introduction to the Minor in Writing class, our main focus was taking one text we’ve created at some point in our life, and reimagined it in three ways, through three different experiments. I chose a video I made this past summer after traveling to Israel, Austria, Croatia, and Italy. This video was simply a compilation of various clips I took throughout my travels, with the purpose of saving these memories and showing them to my family and friends when they asked about my trip. I love travel, and see myself writing a great deal about my travels in the future, so I thought this would be a great starting point in my writing exploration.

 

My first “experiment” was a travel guide. I looked through various travel guides and travel blogs, some widely known and some more personal, and developed a plan for how I would make a guide for the trip I went on. My driving purpose behind this idea was to inspire my audience to step out of their comfort zone, and plan an adventure. By pulling components from various models, I came up with a structure that would blend personal narrative about my experience with more concrete information about how I planned my trip, where I stayed, and how to find the same waterfalls, bike trails, restaurants, and coffee shops that I found.

 

Next, I knew I wanted to experiment with an open letter, because it’s a form of writing that I love to read, but I hadn’t created my own since freshman year. I decided to write about my Birthright trip to Israel, because I felt that I had some valuable advice to share for future participants. My trip showed a limited Palestinian perspective. Being someone that has spent a great deal of time learning both about my Jewish identity and the complicated politics of Israel, I knew what questions to ask and understood that there was more to Israel than the trip had time to show us. However, later that summer I met someone who had also gone on a Birthright trip that summer, but, this was her first time exploring what it means to be Jewish and her first time learning about Israel. She had so many questions, and we had amazing conversations about what she should do more research on to fill the gaps from her trip. My open letter drafts experimented with how to best prepare someone to go on Birthright, set expectations, and provide some food for thought before the trip.

 

I loved working in both of these genres, the travel guide and open letter, but I decided that I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and do something a bit more creative for my third experiment. I wrote a haiku for each city featured in the video, and made a zine/poetry book. I wanted to evoke the same emotions as the video did, of adventure, wanderlust, excitement, and awe in a different genre, and a visual mode such as a zine allowed me to do that. My first decision in this experience was using haikus to tell the story of my trip. I knew it would be a challenge to consolidate meaningful experiences and all the powerful descriptions I could use for each city, into seventeen syllables. However, I knew it would push me to decide what was most definitive and central to each place, and once I finished the poems, I felt I had a beautiful representation of the flow of my trip. Once I decided to put all the poems in a zine, I decided that watercoloring each page would enhance the emotions the book evokes, and I selected colors for each page that corresponds with the aura of each city. Then, I curated some of my favorite photos from each trip, along with photocopies of my journal to give the zine more of a crafty, journal feel. Overall, I’m very pleased with how my zine came out, and feel as though it’s a perfect physical representation of my journey this past summer. I plan on photocopying it and handing it out to my friends and family, and hopefully inspire them to take trips of their own.