Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way.
     ~ C P Cadafy

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October Travel Writing Workshop – Ellen Ryan

I will celebrate my recent family trip by facilitating a two-part workshop on Writing Travel Memories – see the details here.

Late Summer with Family in Sweden

I woke up this morning with words and images floating around me. My husband and I have spent four weeks in Sweden visiting family by the sea and lakes, on islands and bridges, even a ferry and our son’s motor boat. Stockholm  (‘holm’ means island) is a city of 14 main islands beside the Baltic Sea archipelago of thousands. Walking through the Centrum from Kevin’s apartment means crossing bridges, over and under other bridges, viewing boats of all sizes. Staying at the family’s lakehouse means we check  the morning wind by the water ripple – smooth with the current or cross-hatched in a counter breeze – and scout out weather in the lake’s colour(s)  – patches of sunlight or reflections of white or grey clouds.  Kayaks and swans wake us up to the day’s social life.

Over the next months, I will harvest life lessons learned during this privilege of spending time with Kevin, our Swedish daughter-in-law, and our Swedish-Canadian grandchildren during their busy September days north of 60 in another True North.  Writing will be my tool —  first in email messages and my journal, later in episodes for my accumulating memoir for our whole family, and perhaps even to personal essays.

Travel Memories Book List

Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

Wild, Cheryl Strayed 

A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle, 

My Life in France, Julia Child   

The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux

Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother and Daughter Journey to the Sacred Places of Greece, Turkey, and France, Sue Monk Kidd

Walking in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino, Joyce Rupp

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

Travels with Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

Writing Exercise

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Travel involves leaving home. One of the intriguing features of this process is how quickly we can capture the sense of home in new places such as our relatives’ cottage, our snowbird condo, or a two-week apartment in Como Italy. I relish the feeling on the second day in an unfamiliar city when I know three streets, which way to the beach, and where to buy cappuccino — and then the exclamation “So good to be home” after being out all day long.

Write about a time when you enjoyed this newfound sense of home in an unfamiliar setting.

Book Review

Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer 
Roy Peter Clark; Little, Brown: 2008.

This little volume by a master writing teacher offers key strategies regarding language, building a powerful story, and writing habits to create and maintain a healthy writing life. For each strategy, Clark elaborates the title and then gives useful excerpts from published writers to show its impact. He offers the writer/reader exercises for practicing the strategy and constantly urges them to evaluate where the strategy/tool works and where it does not.

My favourite strategies include:

1] Prefer the simple over the technical. “Simplicity is not handed to the writer. It is the produce of imagination and craft, a created effect.”

2] Give words their space – no unintended repetition of words

3] Pay attention to names

4] Seek original images

5] Set the pace with sentence length and paragraph length.  Short sentences and paragraphs put a break on the action. Three reasons to slow the pace of a story: to simplify the complex, to create suspense, and to focus on emotional truth.

6] Learn when to show, when to tell, and when to do both.

7] Tune your voice – read stories aloud.

8] Use dialogue as a form of action.

9] Build your work around a key question.

10] Use purposeful repetition to link the parts of the story

11] Write toward an ending.

With this shadow photo,
I bid you adieu,

Ellen