by Veronika Bednářová (instructor, Travel Writing)
Paris. Shanghai. Oklahoma. Toronto. Vienna. Students from around the world used to meet in our Travel Writing class in Prague, the Czech Republic. For the past 14 years, I have found great comfort in seeing the students leave Prague every weekend in starfish-like directions. I enjoyed reading their passionately written articles from the various European destinations they visited and found so cool.
Now I see them in their pajamas. In the background, there are posters from the high school years before they left home. We share the mood swings of our Wifi networks together. I sometimes hear a dog barking, a younger sibling giggling in the next room. We chucked our syllabus: the Travel Trends 2020 section became completely irrelevant, and one student’s planned trip to Brno, the second biggest city in the Czech Republic, was left behind at the NYU Prague dormitory as a totally unachievable dream.
The world closed, but not our creative writing class.
We Zoom thru our non-existent travels together. I appreciate how much the students have taught me about virtual platforms. Not only do we dream about traveling, we live for traveling. Thanks to Zoom, we constantly plan our future travels, and we take advantage of our past travel experiences.
More than before, we feel we don’t have to travel in style but with good intentions for the planet in mind. The whole tourist industry is asking the same questions at the same time as our class is; it is easy to keep up with those questions thanks to new embedded videos about the travel industry and the newly-recorded interviews with travel specialists. We see a lot of professional travelers in their rooms, in their hometowns.
My TW students still keep their travel journals even though their physical travel is from the bathroom to the living room. They keep writing travel pieces. They just finished profiles, conducted via phone/Skype/Zoom interviews, and it has been an honor to get to know their family members through this forum: an 86-year old grandmother who cant wait to be taken on a tour of Greenwich Village by her grandchild after the quarantine. An 11-year-old sibling who is, like Phoebe in The Catcher in the Rye, the moral compass of the whole extended family.
We might have learned less about foreign destinations during our class, which I have re-named Travel Writing in the Time of No Travel. But we have learned much more about ourselves. For a creative writing course, I can´t imagine a better device.