Writing is a powerful tool for learning, especially when the writer abandons themselves to the process of discovery, simultaneously listening to their experience and the currents contained within a developing text. The project that Ashleigh Cohan (Screenwriting BFA, 2024) created during the travel course The Beauty of Ideas: An Experience of Florence (Interterm, 2023) is testimony to the power of experiential education and travel to transcend pre-conception and to guide us to new inspiration.
The short fiction that Ashleigh created during the period of her study – some of which appeared in the journal Beyond (n.6, 2023) – opens surprising doors of the imagination in a variety of directions. For example, Ashleigh dives into Eleonora De Toledo’s desires and sensibility tied to her possible relationship to the Italian city to which she was brought as the wife of Cosimo I de Medici and her appreciation for nature, possibly connected to the establishment of the Boboli Gardens. In other stories, the writer is drawn by the intricacies of the city’s contemporary life, devising dark twists that voice and confront the traveler’s preconceptions, such as the discovery of a criminal base hidden inside one of the serialized leather souvenir stores.
re of Ashleigh Cohan’s writings on Beyond, the journal of ISI Florence & Umbra Institute Studies in International Education.