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More about this trip-
Rebecca is both a gothic novel—a story about the past colliding violently with the present—and a bildungsroman—a coming-of-age story about a naive young woman confronting the realities of adulthood. It also probes themes of memory, gendered expectations, and entrapment.
On this pilgrimage, we will explore our relationship with the past and consider how it intrudes on the present. We will ask ourselves questions like: What living metaphors have become bound up in the domestic, the house, the body? Who are our ghosts? In what ways have we been trapped, or trapped ourselves? Whose old stories do we feel stuck in? How do we break out? How do we honor our most unruly selves?
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We expect to walk up to 8 miles per day. The weather in this area of the U.K. ranges from the low 40s to high 60s; however, we will walk come rain or shine, and we recommend that pilgrims prepare for the possibility of mud on our walks. We won’t rush our hikes, but we expect to be tired at the end of each day.
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The full tuition of the trip is as follows
Private Room $5,450
Private Room Suite $5,050 (shares bathroom with other pilgrims)
Shared Room $4,650
Meeting Up
We will meet after lunch on May 18th and end programming before lunch on May 22nd. Specific meeting time and location will be offered privately to pilgrims upon payment.
Scholarships
We occasionally offer partial scholarships for pilgrimages. If you are interested, please fill out our form here.
Trip Faculty
Carmen Maria Machado
Faculty Leader (She/Her)
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."
Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.
Vanessa Zoltan
Chaplain (She/Her)
Vanessa is the CEO of Not Sorry Productions. She hosts three of our four podcasts: Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, Let’s Ask Taylor Swift, and Hot & Bothered. She founded Common Ground Pilgrimages in order to travel with brilliant faculty to beautiful places and talk about books with amazing pilgrims. It was a great trick she pulled off. She is also the author of the book, Praying with Jane Eyre.
Vanessa was trained as a non-denominational chaplain at Harvard Divinity School. She is a proud California girl who currently lives in MA with her gorgeous, blended family.
Vanessa will serve as chaplain for this trip.
“A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.”
— Daphne du Maurier