Writing Plan-Yale Nostalgia

I have decided for my own sanity, on multiple levels, that I am going to devotedly keep a journal while I am in Peru.  I think it will be important for me to not only document my experiences, but give myself a chance to reflect on and think about experiences as they happen.  Writing provides a forum for me to think out loud, but also to give myself a dispassionate/birds eye view kind of perspective that keeps me healthy and happy.  I think that will be really important.  I also really like the idea of potentially using what I work on abroad to eventually publish.  It's a bucket list thing, at the very least.  I will be published.

I'm listening to this new song that I downloaded from the new Harry Potter Soundtrack.  Music for this movie was EPIC.  So beautiful, this gorgeous symphony creates this melody that you can feel swell and dip, the sound is rich and full and enveloping.  I can almost feel it flow through my hands and slip between my fingers.  One thing I love about writing is that it is its own kind of symphony.  Each word is a small piece of creative expression set within the context of a larger sentence, within a paragraph, within a page or chapter or book, growing stronger and more beautiful within the perfect harmony of the whole story, in relationship to the overarching melody.  Words start as nearly unimportant individual things but as more mix and fuse, the melody becomes more clear, and by the end those individual words are cultivated into symphonies rich with emotion and powerful in their collective splendor.  

I like to write. Obvi.

I have embarrassingly spent an absurd amount of time looking up Yale on google images.  I hate myself for not taking more pictures of that place.  You seem to think you'll be there forever while you're there, and a large amount of the time you don't have the perspective to realize how happy you should be.  I am so nostalgic.  I want to go back and do it all over again.  I'm already hungry for intellectual stimulation, for new information, for new knowledge.
I have taken things into my own hands.
Given that I want to write about the Peace Corps and maybe publish it one day, and I have no way to take a Yale class any time soon, I'm going to create my own Yale class.  I looked up the syllabus for the travel writing seminar I almost took last semester and wrote down all the assigned reading.  I also emailed Dean Woodard, asked what she thought of the list and what I should add or cross off.  She has been such an amazing source of support and encouragement for me with my writing.  I'm still waiting to hear back, but I figure I will read travel writing books and give myself a kind of homework assignment to write at least a tiny bit every day.  Dean Woodard always said that all it takes to be a writer is to write. She's so right.  I can only get better the more I write, and I already think like a writer.

What does that mean? Think like a writer?

I discovered pretty recently that I think in a way that is apparently sort of strange. When I see something cool, experience something unique or beautiful or horrible, I immediately start to write about it in my head.  I work hard on choosing the right words to describe what it is that I am experiencing so that I can share it with someone else.  I don't really have any intention of sharing it with someone else, but if I don't have a pen and paper handy, I get really frustrated.  I've always done that, as long as I can remember.  I experience something interesting and I immediately try to write a description in my head.  I can't imagine how overwhelming that is going to be while I am in Peru with all the new stuff, I'm going to have to carry around the book Sam gave me for graduation everywhere so that I can jot everything down and write it in full later.

Anyway, that's my fancy plan.

Books currently on the list for my own personal travel writing class:
Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen (i suggest this to people - he's great)
Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara
Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China by Rachel DeWoskin

The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

South: the Last Antarctic Expedition of Shackleton and the Endurance

Video Night in Katmandu, And other Reports from the Not So Far East by Pico Iyer

Best Women's Travel Writing 2009 by Lucy McCauley (got great reviews!)

Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell

I also bought Best American Travel Writing 2010 and 2004 at the Borders in Madison Square Garden because they were closing down and the books were only like $3.  

Anyone have any thoughts on my list?  I have already read Bill Bryson, in case that popped in your head as a possible suggestion.  

ALSO - if anyone has any book suggestions in general, a book you've read that you really loved, please let me know what it is!  I got a Kindle for my birthday and I need to pick a bunch of books to download onto my Kindle for two years of literary fulfillment! 

Thanks!