Equivocality

Announcing the Second Annual Writer’s Travel Scholarship!

I would call last year’s inaugural Writer’s Travel Scholarship a success. I recieved many interesting entries, including one which really blew me away. On the strength of her piece Detail In A Round Globe, Ms. Ava di Luna is now in Kenya. She deserves it, and I hope to see more from this talented writer.

So I want to do it again. Once again the prize is a round-trip ticket anywhere in the world. There will be a few administrative details changed based on last year’s experience; hopefully this will make the process simpler and more transparent. I’ve also decided to start much earlier in the year, to accomodate students who might want to travel during the summer. The basic rationale for the contest remains the same, however:

I think travel is good. I think writing is good. I think it is important that writers travel.

Once again, I’m not necessarily interested in travel writing. Travel writing has a place, to be sure, but as Paul Theroux said it is actually “a minor form of autobiography.” Personally I find autobiography a very difficult form to write, as I waver between mundanity and arrogance — I know that I find my own life interesting, but will anyone else? Not that I am summarily ruling out travelouges, to be sure, but I would like to reiterate that this is about writers travelling, not travel writing.

Travel has been the most amazing experience of my entire life, and this opinion is common (at least among travellers.) There is something magical about losing your context, about waking up in a place where all the cultural and social expectations are different. In fact, very often in travelling what is most disconcerting is the absence of such expectations. Especially if one is travelling alone, one is free to be a completely different person in each town. That kind of freedom, it turns out, is a difficult proposition.

What one brings back is new personal choices and an imprint of places and cultures that can be astonishingly different from one’s own. Often the result is profound insights into both one’s own life and the lives of others far away. To put it another way, nothing expands the imagination like reality, diligently experienced.

Or that is my experience, anyway. The hope is that others will find something valuable in this exercise — and that their writing will be the better for it.

On to the details.

• Applicants must submit a short piece, 10,000 words maximum. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever, on any topic, but let’s keep it to prose simply because I don’t feel competent to evaluate poetry.
• Also tell me a little about yourself, where you would go with your free ticket, for how long, and why. You can’t ever have been to that country before. You don’t have to write about your destination. I just want to know what about it inspires you to go through the considerable effort required to actually travel there.
• Email entries to wts (at) equivocality (dot) net by May 1st 2006. They will be judged by myself and my writer friends, the winner to be announced on May 15th 2006.
• All entries will by anonymized by a third party before review. (Yes, this means people I know may apply.)
• Entries must be previously unpublished, there is a limit of one entry per author, and the ticket is limited to $2000 US. I will book the cheapest available round-trip ticket, based on departure and return dates given to me by the winner. I will try to accomdate these dates and other preferences as much as possible, but I reserve the right to shift each date plus or minus five days, and to make other choices such as routing and airline, in order to find the best fare. Other travel requirements, such as additional destinations or an open return date, may be accommodated if the winner wishes to make up the difference in cost.
• By submitting a piece, you grant me (Jonathan Shekter) limited web-publishing rights, specifically the right to display it on equivocality.net and any other sites of I may have some degree of editorial control over. I reserve no other rights. If someone sees your work here and wants to publish it, fantastic.
• All decisions are final, and by submitting a piece you agree that I am under no obligation to award any prize at all. The idea is also to fund a developing writer who might not otherwise be able to afford to travel, so please keep this in mind when considering whether to apply. I have no funding, no committees, no mandate. I’m doing this just because I think it’s a good idea, so let’s keep it simple.

Good luck!