English 703

ENGL 703: Travel Writing Tom Haines

Great travel writing begins and ends with the intimacy of experience. But it is anchored by research and reflection. Each student in this course will produce a series of travel essays from our home base of Cambridge and the places we visit, whether Stratford-upon-Avon, London, or farther afield. Students will draw from their transplanted lives in England to seek their own narratives of place. They will meet at least once in individual conference with the instructor, while regularly critiquing essays-in-progress during class. Students will be encouraged to experiment with style and form, and they will take inspiration and insight from assigned travel writing by such authors as Rolf Potts and Annie Dillard.

This course is available for graduate credit as English 803.

Tom Haines is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, where he teaches digital journalism, newswriting, and narrative nonfiction. He has reported in more than 30 countries and on five continents, on topics ranging from coal to cricket, art to revolution. He has three times been named Travel Journalist of the Year in North America for work that appeared in The Boston Globe, where he was a staff writer. Editors of the Nieman Narrative Digest described Tom as "a cross-cultural guide, seeking to take his readers into foreign worlds, to help them experience another culture's deep difference - and also its humanity." Tom is the author of one short story, "Great Rift Valley," which appeared in The Whitefish Review, and one play, "Chicken?," written and staged one fine weekend at The Crowley Theater, a converted feed store in the high-desert town of Marfa, Texas.