I mentioned at the end of my last entry that I wanted to give a full entry to talking about the travel fellowship I just applied for. So, BU’s Creative Writing Program recently received a donation that allows them to award travel fellowships to their students. Last year, the first year the fellowships were offered, they sent about 20% of the class abroad, but this year they are hoping to send up to 50% of my class (across all three genres of fiction, poetry, and playwriting). It’s such an amazing award because you can choose to go anywhere in the world for up to three months and do basically anything you want in order to enhance your writing. To apply, we had to write a short proposal about where we wanted to go and what we’d do there.
I never applied to study abroad in college, and I have sometimes looked back and wished I had. I did get to do the May Term in Luxembourg immediately following my sophomore year though (for any current students thinking about applying to this program—do it. It’s so much fun, and it is a way to get a small taste of the study abroad experience if you aren’t able to fit an entire year abroad into your schedule). Other than that month though, I have never spent time outside of the country, not even in Canada. So I knew I definitely had to apply for one of these fellowships.
When I first thought about where I wanted to go, one place that immediately crossed my mind was Bali. Any HC theatre major will know why. I took four semesters of Balinese dance at Holy Cross, and I thought about what it might be like to live there and study their dance and culture on a more in-depth basis. But there was one thought I just could never get out of my head… that I have always, always wanted to go to Ireland. And if I could spend three months in another country, that was the one place that I could see myself being the happiest and learning the most. I want to stay in one of the small Gaeltacht regions (areas where the Irish language is still the predominant everyday language) in County Cork and learn the language. I also want to be able to take classes in Irish dance and learn about Celtic folklore and poetry and music, and then use all of my experiences to eventually create a play that would interweave dance and music with the folklore and incorporate some of the native language into it.
It will be tough getting a fellowship because they are going to give preference to students traveling someplace where English isn’t spoken. And even with my desire to go to a Gaeltacht, I know that it’s going to be harder to convince the committee than if I were going someplace where most of the population doesn’t know English. But I had to write the proposal that would make me the happiest, so I had to go with Ireland. In my research into the Múscraí Gaeltacht in County Cork, I discovered so much about the region that I am determined to go there someday with or without a fellowship. I’ll make sure to keep everyone updated when I find out one way or the other.
In unrelated but very frightening news, my theater today updated its website to include an ad for the Ground Floor Reading Series, a.k.a. “the readings of the playwriting students’ MFA thesis plays.” The readings are in April, and it’s terrifying to see them mentioned on the website already. This program goes by so fast!