Your food poisoning story deserves a better audience than your group chat.
Let's get your funny travel moments off your phone and into print.
A free one-hour class with Paulette Perhach, Gold winner in Funny Travel Writing at the Solas Awards.
The truly funny story possesses a reader's body. Symptoms include the helpless shaking, the tears running down cheeks, the ever-feared involuntary public snort. You can cause that. In a stranger. Writers are magicians!
Could there be a better setup for a comedic story than travel? You've got sky-high expectations just waiting to be dashed. You've got intercultural mishaps. You've got gastrointestinal acts of violence in acoustically traitorous restroom facilities.
There's nothing more fun than cracking a crowd up with your mishaps. There's nothing so frustrating than feeling narratively impotent to truly share the experience, and pasting over the silence of that failure with "I guess you had to be there."
They didn't have to be there. You just have to beef up your funny bone.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
6 Killer Moves to Make a Stranger Snort
Paulette will walk you through the six craft moves behind her Solas Award-winning stories — the specific techniques that turn a travel memory into something a reader can't put down and can't read quietly.
WHY THIS, WHY NOW
This spring, Paulette took Gold in Funny Travel Writing and Bronze for Travel Story of the Year at the Solas Awards for her story Boob Deck — what the judges called "a hilarious tale of taking charge while under the leering gaze of men." The piece will appear in the Best Women's Travel Writing Anthology.
To celebrate, she's throwing open the doors for one hour to share what she knows about creating humor.
(The Solas Awards next submission deadline is September 21, 2026. Hint hint!)
WHO THIS IS FOR?
You have travel stories you haven't finished. You know something funny happened — you just haven't figured out how to make it funny on the page. You've said "you had to be there" one too many times and you're ready to move past the crutch.
This is for you.
THE DETAILS
Date: Wednesday, April 22
Time: 11:30am – 12:30 p.m. ET
Free. One hour.
SAVE YOUR SEAT for free
PREPARATION
To prepare for the class, read these past publications from Paulette:
Funny Travel Essays:
Travel Satire:
A Travel Story That Is Not Funny But Uses Dark Humor
Somewhere out there, a stranger on the subway is waiting to snort at your story. Let's give them something to work with.
Meet Your Coach
Paulette Perhach has been writing professionally for 20 years, with work published in the New York Times and other major outlets. She won two 2024 Solas Travel Writing Awards — gold for funny travel writing and bronze for best travel story of the year — and was selected for Best Women's Travel Writing, an anthology that published 27 essays out of 1,600 submitted.
She's coached hundreds of writers through her FINISH Framework, a system built specifically for the creative person with a real life who keeps running out of momentum.
She knows what it feels like to get the call. She wants that for you.
Free. One hour. Live Q&A at the end.
WITH PERSONAL ESSAYS IN:
