Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, captivating readers depends, to a good degree, on your ability to create an immersive sense of place and time. There’s an urgency to this work as well. Worldbuilding invites questions about the historical and contemporary borders between fiction and nonfiction, about the power of witness and imagination, about what we pay attention to and why. In writing about place, we can record people, communities, and histories, working against the threat of neglect, erasure, and violence.
In this course we’ll study manifold ways of bringing places, and therefore stories, to life: setting, scene, and character. The emphasis will be on craft. We’ll delve into research tactics, plumbing primary and secondary sources as well as photographic, cartographic, and experiential methods. Prompts for short pieces will focus on how to integrate place meaningfully and artfully into writing. Our guides as we roam through real and imagined worlds include Saidiya Hartman, Barry Lopez, Rebecca Solnit, Jesmyn Ward, and C. Pam Zhang.

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