What This Blog Is and Why You Are Here

What follows is my experience on the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrim path that runs 500 miles across Northern Spain. Like most pilgrims, I undertook the walk for personal and spiritual reasons. It is also part of my 1-year field project for the Creative Pulse Masters Degree at the University of Montana. By reading these posts, you become part of my project and I would like to say before you start thank you for your presence here.

My field project, entitled "A Voice on the Road," has four central goals:

• First, I seek to explore my writer's voice through activation of all my senses

• Second, I hope to better understand if or how the process of journeying influences my writing

• Third, I want to ascertain whether or not my photographs translate an "inner voice"/idea

• And, finally, I hope to address two challenges with my speaking voice: 1) my propensity to talk low and quietly and 2) my profuse use of diphthongs which cause me to mush words incoherently together

As part of this year-long project I have worked to engage voice in ways that are neither comfortable or familiar for me:

Writing by Hand

During my 40-day walk on Camino, I kept only a hand-written daily journal rather than typing out my daily experience on my computer. Writing by hand is a tremendous challenge for me. My hand is slower than my thinking/processing brain and I find when I write by hand I often I lose ideas, my thoughts become dense or flighty, and my handwriting is hard to read. Yet, research shows that writing by hand stimulates creativity, word recall and overall memory. Through this project I am investigating if or how writing by hand changes what I remember, how I recall information or experience and, ultimately, what and how I write about the Camino journey for public consumption.

I'll say up front that I believe hand-writing did in fact change my writing voice -- or at least expanded it. When I finished the trip and went back to read my written journals, I found they were either long and boring diary entries or incomplete notes. And then I found myself trying to "make" them feel more spiritual, more magical. As I started transcribing the notebooks, I realized I was forcing a Camino experience onto the blog page that wasn't mine. I wrote 23 posts based on a direct transcription of my journals. Then I deleted them. What I understood in doing so was that my Camino was hiding among the forced words of long, uninteresting, reportage and narrative. With time and reflection, I was able to sift out key words from the thick flour of the journal entries. They became poems, short stories and simpler, truer reflections which I believe better capture my experience of the pilgrimage. These writings do not follow the daily timeline of my journal. Rather they flow as I feel the walk flowed for me, a little chaotically.

Drawing to See

The second challenge I gave myself in this project was to engage in a daily practice of line drawing. Each day during the pilgrimage I drew something I saw, heard or felt rather than take a photo of it. These drawings are guttural and plain, you might say childlike. That is because I am NOT an artist in the form of drawing. Still I include them here for the sake of documenting my project goal. I consider myself an amateur photographer and did take photos on the road. Some of these images from the pilgrimage, sorted by pilgrim themes (shells, arrows, the road, embellishments and saints) are in the gallery section of this blog. In January I will add images from previous journeys to these, seeking out thematic connections.

Sounding to be Heard

Finally, I spent one or more hours each day during the walk sounding, singing and doing vocal exercises provided by my voice mentor and several other voice improvement sources. For the purpose of the field project, I am learning to vocalize correctly, then speak with better articulation, without slipping into dipthongs. On the road I began to learn, then sing an ancient pilgrim song: Stella Spendens. Learning to sound and sing continues to be a slow process but I feel hopeful my voice is improving. An audio of my singing Stella Splendens will appear in the blog at some point. This will be no small feat for someone who is often asked "What did you say?" and rarely if ever sings out loud.

For transparency sake I must add that my Camino was undertaken with my domestic partner who was (and still is) struggling with severe, almost debilitating, depression. It is referenced often in these writings. It was part of my journey and taught me many things about myself and him and I am deeply grateful he undertook the walk. More, I am humbled by the courage it took for him to complete it.

Before we start I wish to thank Sharon, who encouraged me to make both the journey into grad school and this journey into myself. She is my mentor, my wise counsel and a mother to my soul.

Buen Camino!

Cheryl Murfin, Creative Pulse/University of Montana