travel

Four weeks ago in my first column about my trip to China I wrote how I hoped to encounter China's "cultural core," its Confucian "root," and experience it.

During my two weeks in China I did encounter what I might call China's ancient core a few times-in a ceremonial smudging outside a Buddhist temple and the timeless view across West Lake in Hangzhou, in the colorful ancestors' tombs on the hillsides on the way to Yiwu, and upon arriving in that city listening to an old singer chant an ancient song in an ancestors' temple.

A friend wrote today in an email and said "Save the Earth" at the end of her note. I'll admit I've thought about the problems of "saving the earth" a great deal since we touched down in Shanghai. The pressures on the planet here are seriously extreme already, and it's obvious they will mount in the next few decades. The scholars who have lectured us have said that the Chinese know they will not be able to establish a middle class like the West because there will simply not be enough resources.

This sets my personal record for distance learning. I'm half-way around the world in China's largest city, Shanghai. It's Day Three of the Wofford Milliken Faculty Development seminar.

I think it's yesterday where you are, or maybe it's yesterday here, and today there. Time is just the first of my concepts under renovation. This morning the only thing I know for sure is I'm not in Kansas (or Cowpens) anymore.

I'm headed to China for two weeks on a Wofford College faculty study trip. At first I wasn't very excited about going. I'm not a city boy, and our whole 14-day excursion would mostly take place in vast Shanghai, a coastal city of over 20 million people, China's New York, a pulsing vortex of trade, commerce and consumerism.

I flew to Chicago this past week for the yearly conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, or AWP as everyone calls it.

AWP is an annual writing conference I've attended off and on for 25 years.  My first one was in 1984 in Savannah, and there were 1,500 writers there. The past two years, New York and Chicago, the throng of poets, fiction writers and essayists has topped 8,000.
 
In 1967 when AWP was formed it had only 13 member institutions. Today it has over 400.  In 1984 when I first attended the Savannah AWP conference there were 31 schools nationwide offering an MFA, the most common terminal degree for those who hope to teach creative writing. Today there are well over a hundred.

Even Spartanburg's liberal arts colleges have added to this growth in creative writing. In 1988 when I arrived at Wofford there was one creative writing course divided over two semesters. Today, there are eight courses available at the college. Choosing among those courses a student can either create a concentration within the English major, or construct a free-standing minor.

There is a great deal of talk in the current election cycle about what is real and what is fake. Who is a real American? Where is the "real" Virginia? Who is more "real"-Joe the Plumber or the latte liberal? It seems to be a watershed year for reality.

This past weekend when I flew to Vermont for an environmental studies conference at Middlebury College I knew I would be impressed by the elite liberal arts school's efforts at "greening" its campus, curriculum, and student body.  After all, Middlebury received a grade of A- on the College Sustainability Report Card for 2008. Furman, the greenest school in our region, scored B- on the same report.

Last week the state of Florida announced a monumental conservation agreement as big as anything ever achieved out west-a  $1.75 billion deal to buy 187,000 acres of farmland from U.S. Sugar and use much of it in the Everglades' $10 billion restoration project.

On our California trip we stayed several nights in a friend's B&B near Point Reyes Station. Our lodging was officially in Inverness, just across Tomales Bay, but it was an easy drive into town to explore.