The Writer’s Road Trip: How to use the journey as a vehicle for narrative
The journey is one of the most basic narrative devices in American storytelling. It can create physical movement, encourage character introspection and development, and build the dramatic tension and release needed for facilitating plot. In this workshop, Columbia professor Patricia Ann McNair demonstrates the structure in literary models, then conducts an extended writing activity for the group. The session applies to writers of short or long fiction as well as creative non-fiction.
Patricia Ann McNair’s The Temple of Air received the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Society of Midland Authors (US) Finalist Award. McNair’s prose has appeared in various publications including American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, Superstition Review, Prime Number, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and others. Her short story, My Mother’s Daughter won the Solstice Lit Mag Fiction Award. She’s received numerous Illinois Arts Council Awards and Pushcart Prize nominations and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at Columbia College.
