Class 9 - Place and Nonfiction Writing

Welcome Back

In this session, we’re going to look at place. You’ve all had a chance to read Annie Dillard’s strange opening to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

This is a book about a specific corner of the world, a specific place, and Dillard’s relationship with this place. So this week, we’re going to think about the places that we inhabit, and how to write about them in a way that is compelling and vivid.

Drawing

In the first part of this session, I want you to think back to the Annie Dillard piece you have read. You can refer back to the text if you like, but you do not have to. Take one single scene from the piece that you find particularly vivid. Now take a piece of paper, and draw the scene that you can picture in your mind’s eye.

You’ll have ten minutes to draw.

Discussion

In your groups, share your drawing, and talk about the following question:

How does Dillard evoke the world of Tinker Creek?

Place

Now we’re going to try an exercise thinking about the places where stories take place, and our experiences of these places.

When writing about places, we are not just writing disengaged description. We are writing about places as experienced. Places have a particular feel — we settle into them physically in different ways. There are details we notice, and details we overlook. There are people as well, who we live alongside. There are smells, physical feels.

Different places shape our behaviour, provoke memories, open up certain opportunities and close down other opportunities. They shape our selves.

Writing Home

• Write about the room — or the house — where you live, your exact and specific surroundings. What is your view for most of the day? Where do you walk? What and who do you share the space with? What is it like? What activities do you engage in there (reading, cleaning, walking, gaming etc.)?
• Now write about this place as vividly as you can so a reader can picture it in their minds.

A Visitor

The final thing we’ll do today is exchange our writing with each other in pairs or threes.

Take another writer’s writing, and draw the scene that the writing evokes for you. You have ten minutes.

Then I’ll put you back into groups to compare notes. How successfully did you evoke the world you are writing about? What did you omit that you think you should have included? What did your reader misconstrue?

Homework

For homework, I am going to get you to read another place-based piece of writing, and that is the opening chapter of Michelle Kuo’s Reading With Patrick. There are two reasons I have set this. The first is that Michelle is coming to talk to us at the end of October (hurrah!). And the second is that she is wonderful at evoking place not just as a physical environment, but also as history, and a particular set of social relationships, and class, and race, and culture. I hope you love the reading as much as I do!

As Michelle will be coming to talk to us all, your only other homework is to post on the discussion board one question you would really like to ask her, having read the first chapter.