What It’s Really Like to Attend MatadorU’s Guest Faculty Workshop with Novelist Mary Sojourner

🌍 The Moment I Knew This Wasn’t Just Another Writing Workshop

I sat cross-legged on a sun-warmed wooden floor in Santa Fe, notebook open, pen hovering—not over a sentence I’d written, but over one Mary Sojourner had just spoken aloud: ‘The place you’re writing from is already inside you. You don’t go there to find it—you go there to remember it.’ Outside, a late August wind rustled the cottonwood leaves like pages turning. Inside, my throat tightened—not from nerves, but from recognition. I hadn’t traveled 1,200 miles from Portland to attend a ‘MatadorU welcomes novelist Mary Sojourner as guest faculty’ event because I needed another credential or a polished bio line. I’d come because, after three years of writing travel essays that felt increasingly detached from the people and places they described, I’d started to forget how to listen. And listening—really listening—was what Sojourner taught first, before syntax, before structure, before even the word ‘deadline.’ That afternoon, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with 11 other writers in a borrowed adobe studio off Canyon Road, I realized this wasn’t about craft alone. It was about relearning how to be present while moving through the world—and how to carry that presence home.

🗺️ The Setup: Why Santa Fe? Why Now?

I booked the trip in early June—a decision rooted less in inspiration and more in exhaustion. My freelance travel writing had become a cycle of chasing angles: ‘10 Hidden Cafés in Lisbon,’ ‘How to Visit Kyoto on $45/Day,’ ‘The Ultimate Guide to Solo Female Travel in Georgia (the country).’ Each piece performed well. Each left me quieter afterward. I began noticing gaps—not in research, but in resonance. I could describe the exact shade of cobalt tile in a Seville courtyard (#2A5B8C), list the bus schedule from Kutaisi to Batumi (every 45 min, 3 hr, ~$4), even transcribe the vendor’s laugh at a Chiang Mai night market—but I rarely captured what it felt like to stand there, unrecorded, unposted, unoptimized.

So when MatadorU announced Mary Sojourner would lead a week-long intensive—part workshop, part field journaling retreat—I didn’t scan for discounts or compare dates. I checked Amtrak’s Southwest Chief schedule (1). A direct train from Portland to Albuquerque, then a 1.5-hour Greyhound bus to Santa Fe. Total cost: $187 round-trip, booked 22 days ahead. No flights. No baggage fees. No TSA queues. Just a window seat, a thermos of strong coffee, and permission to slow down. I chose Santa Fe not for its ‘vibe’ or ‘aesthetic,’ but because Sojourner lives there—and because her work has always centered land, memory, and the quiet friction between settler history and Indigenous presence. If I was going to relearn how to write with integrity, I needed to do it somewhere that demanded honesty from the ground up.

🌧️ The Turning Point: When the Map Didn’t Match the Weather

The first real disruption arrived on Day Two—during our morning walk to the Plaza. Forecast: sunny, 82°F. Reality: thick, low clouds rolling in off the Sangre de Cristos, air heavy and cool, smelling of petrichor and roasting green chile. My meticulously color-coded itinerary—‘9:00–10:30 AM: Observation Drill, Plaza Benches’—dissolved before we reached the Palace of the Governors. Raindrops began tapping the adobe walls like hesitant fingers.

Mary paused under the portal’s deep overhang, pulled a small, water-stained Moleskine from her satchel, and said, ‘Let’s sit. Not to write. Just to wait.’ We did. Ten minutes passed. Someone shared trail mix. A Navajo elder walked by selling hand-coiled pottery, his sandals whispering on wet stone. A teenage boy practiced guitar on a bench across the way—notes trembling, then steadying. No one opened laptops. No one checked phones. I watched condensation bead and run down the glass of a nearby café window, tracing paths like miniature rivers. My instinct—to document, to categorize, to ‘optimize the moment’—felt suddenly absurd. What was I optimizing for? A publishable anecdote? A social proof metric? Or something quieter—a texture, a pause, a shift in light no camera could hold?

That afternoon, instead of drafting ‘Plaza Observations,’ I wrote two paragraphs about waiting. Not about what happened after the rain stopped—but about the weight of stillness, the sound of runoff dripping into a gutter, the way my own impatience softened when I stopped measuring time against output.

📝 The Discovery: Who Shows Up When You Stop Performing

What surprised me most wasn’t Sojourner’s teaching—it was who showed up around it. Not just the 12 participants (a geographer from Ohio, a retired teacher from Tucson, a documentary filmmaker from Belfast), but the people we met simply by being unhurried: the woman at the Lensic Theater box office who told us, unprompted, about her grandmother’s recipes for blue corn mush; the librarian at the New Mexico History Museum who, when I asked about Spanish colonial land grants, slid a photocopied 1932 oral history interview across the counter—handwritten, fragile, smudged with pencil notes; the young artist at the Railyard Park mural site who let us watch her layer ochre and iron oxide paint onto concrete, explaining how pigment binds differently in high desert air.

None were ‘contacts.’ None were ‘sources.’ They were people who spoke when spoken to slowly, who offered detail only after silence had settled between us—not as data points, but as offerings. Mary modeled this constantly. She never asked, ‘What’s your story?’ Instead: ‘What’s one thing you noticed today that surprised you?’ Or: ‘Where did your attention go when you thought no one was watching?’ These weren’t icebreakers. They were permissions—to be imperfect, uncertain, unfinished.

One evening, walking back from a group dinner at a family-run restaurant near Guadalupe Street, Mary pointed to a cluster of juniper trees silhouetted against the dusk sky. ‘They’ve been here longer than any building in this town,’ she said. ‘They don’t need your interpretation. They just ask you to notice their shape against the light.’ It struck me: my travel writing had become an act of extraction—pulling meaning out of places to serve my byline. What if, instead, it could be an act of witness—holding space for complexity without resolving it?

🚌 The Journey Continues: From Notes to Navigation

We spent Day Four on the Pueblo of Pojoaque, invited by community member and educator Dr. Corrine Sanchez to observe (with permission) the annual Tewa Language Revitalization Camp. No recording devices. No notebooks open. Just sitting in a circle of shade beneath a cottonwood, listening to children chant animal names in Tewa—ts’o’na (coyote), we’ya (deer)—their voices overlapping, stumbling, then finding rhythm together. Later, Dr. Sanchez explained how language isn’t just vocabulary—it’s syntax for relationship: ‘In Tewa, you don’t say “I see the mountain.” You say “The mountain sees me back.”’

That phrase rewired something. Back in my room at the modest but clean El Rey Inn ($89/night, booked via direct phone call—no third-party fees), I reviewed my notes. Instead of editing for ‘engagement,’ I looked for moments where reciprocity lived: the vendor who insisted I try a sample of dried apricots before buying, then remembered my name the next day; the park ranger who, when I asked about trail conditions, first asked what I hoped to feel on the hike; the elderly couple at Café Pasqual’s who corrected my pronunciation of chile—not with pedantry, but with the gentle insistence of someone guarding a word’s warmth.

By Day Six, our ‘assignments’ had shifted. No more prompts like ‘Describe a local market.’ Instead: ‘Write a paragraph where you are not the main character. Where does agency reside?’ I wrote about the cracked stucco wall outside my window—the way lichen spread in fractal patterns, indifferent to my presence, thriving in alkaline dust and intermittent rain. It felt like cheating. Also like truth.

🌅 Reflection: What Travel Demands When You Stop Touring

I left Santa Fe with fewer published clips than I’d planned, but with something harder to quantify: a recalibrated sense of duration. Budget travel, I’d assumed, meant stretching dollars—finding cheaper hostels, slower buses, free walking tours. But this trip taught me budget travel also means stretching attention. Slowing down isn’t a luxury reserved for those with time to spare. It’s a practical strategy: fewer destinations per day means deeper observation, fewer transactions means more meaningful exchanges, fewer photos means more memory encoding. I spent $42 on bus fare, $28 on groceries for simple meals, $12 on museum entry fees—but the real savings came from refusing to treat every hour as billable.

Sojourner never used the word ‘authenticity.’ She talked about ‘accuracy’—not of fact, but of feeling. Accuracy of temperature. Accuracy of hesitation. Accuracy of what you don’t know. That accuracy doesn’t emerge from exhaustive research alone. It emerges from showing up—tired, curious, slightly out of step—and letting the place adjust you, not the other way around.

💡 Practical Takeaways: Lessons Woven Into Motion

These insights didn’t arrive as bullet points. They settled in during motion—in the sway of the Amtrak coach, the rhythm of walking on packed earth, the silence between questions and answers:

• 🚂 Choose transit that enforces slowness. The Southwest Chief’s 22-hour Portland–Albuquerque run forced me to abandon productivity. I watched irrigation ditches give way to mesas, saw weather systems move across horizons. That visual literacy—the ability to read landforms, cloud types, seasonal shifts—became foundational to everything else.
• 🧭 Carry fewer tools, more questions. I brought one notebook, one pen, a small cloth bag. No voice recorder, no DSLR, no translation app. Instead, I carried phrases like ‘May I sit with you a moment?’ and ‘What name does this place use for itself?’—questions that opened doors no gear could.
• ☕ Build routine around local rhythms, not your own. I aligned my mornings with the plaza’s pulse: vendors setting up by 7:30 a.m., elders gathering on benches by 8:15, schoolchildren passing by at 8:45. Matching pace built trust faster than any introduction.
• 🌄 Reserve space for weather-based pivots. Rain, wind, or sudden heat aren’t obstacles—they’re narrative collaborators. That overhang where we waited? It became the opening image of my strongest essay from the trip.

⭐ Conclusion: How This Trip Changed My Perspective

I no longer measure a trip’s value by how many places I ‘cover.’ I measure it by how many silences I can hold without filling them. By how often I catch myself assuming a story belongs to me—and how quickly I can release that grip. Mary Sojourner didn’t teach me how to write better travel stories. She taught me how to stop writing travel stories that erase the very people and places they claim to honor. The ‘MatadorU welcomes novelist Mary Sojourner as guest faculty’ announcement wasn’t an invitation to consume expertise. It was a threshold. And crossing it required leaving behind not just my packed bag, but my certainty about what travel ‘should’ produce. What remains is simpler, heavier, more necessary: the practice of arriving—with nothing to prove, and everything to receive.