CFP: THE TRAVEL WRITERS WORKSHOP - ASIA 2020

Call for Submissions:

The Travel Writers Workshop - Asia 2020

Applications are now open for the annual instalment of The Travel Writers Workshop - Asia (TTWW - Asia), an intensive week-long outdoors camp and writing fellowship which aims to create spaces for Asian and non-Asian travelers and emerging travel writers.

TTWW - Asia welcomes travel writings and its various permutations — travel essay, travel memoir, and travel narrative. Other creative nonfiction subgenres such as place studies, city essays, nature writing, narrative history, and mini-ethnographies, or their hybridization, are also welcome. Limited slots are given to travel-themed poetry and short fiction manuscripts.

Travel writings may topically extend into a raft of themes and topicalities that include alterity; (counter)cartographies; cultural and psychic geography; displacement/diaspora; ecology; ethnoreligious/ideopolitical conflicts; the flaneur; ‘foodways’/gastronomic culture; gendered routes and borders; globality; landscape/seascape aesthetics; liminal spaces; nature/culture divide (or the ‘naturalcultural’); nomadism; nostalgia/solastalgia; place mutualism; psychogeography; sodalities and subcultures; spatio-temporal (im)materialities; tourism; topology and topophilia; and transnationalism/transregionalism. Other muted but compelling issues that add novelty to — or counter the dominant discourse in — the historical archive and contemporary corpus of travel literature are also welcome.

Submissions should be set or based within Asia.

An outdoors writers workshop, TTWW - Asia will be held in Siargao Islands, Surigao del Sur in the Philippines. Apart from free board and lodging, and domestic transportation allowance, TTWW - Asia offers its travel writing fellows a study on the craft and techniques of travel writing across genres through lectures, discussions, critique, mentoring, and writing exercises as well as inputs on publishing, arts project management, and travel photography, while touring in partner establishments and tourist spots in Siargao.

There are ten (10) writing fellowships available. Only shortlisted applicants will receive a response via email. Manuscripts in English (or translated into English from any Asian language) — original and previously unpublished — may be any of the following:

• Creative nonfiction and essays: 2 to 3 pieces (1500 to 5000 words each) in the nonfiction subgenres mentioned above;
• Short fiction: a sequence of 2 to 3 travel-themed short fiction (1500 to 5000 words each);
• Poetry: a suite of 5 to 7 travel-themed poems; or
• Chapbook/book-length collection of travel writings: unpublished manuscript of 6 to 10 creative nonfiction pieces.     

Include a personal/(auto)critical essay (2 to 3 pages) on travel poetics with the prompt “Why I travel.” Send manuscripts, essay on travel poetics, cover letter, and curriculum vitae/resume to thetravelwritersworkshop@gmail.com on or before 05 January 2020.

Asian writers (or writers with Asian origin) who wish to be part of the workshop’s teaching panel may send in a letter of intent and their body of works in travel literature (both published and unpublished) to the same email address.

TTWW - Asia’s 2020 instalment is scheduled on the third quarter of 2020.

thetravelwritersworkshop@gmail.com

F Alex San Juan