I Remember: Using Public Space to Construct Narrative
Wednesdays 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM
This five-week generative writing workshop explores the interplay between our physical surroundings and inner world. Through direct engagement with public environments, we will observe how walking, loitering, shopping, and commuting can inspire writing. How do these everyday movements shape perception, memory, and narrative?
Observations and experience will become the foundation for new writing, unfolding into meditative episodes, digressive accounts, and stream-of-consciousness vignettes that capture lived experience and the movement of thought.
Each session will unfold in three parts: moving through public spaces to observe and gather material, a focused writing period with prompts, and opportunities to share work for those who wish.
This class is open to writers and artists of any level interested in deepening their engagement with space, perception, and writing.
Short, optional assigned readings will serve as inspiration, featuring authors such as Nicholson Baker, Teju Cole, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, and W.G. Sebald, among others.
By the end of the course, students will leave with a body of new writing, fresh observational tools, and a renewed awareness of how movement shapes creative practice.
Learning Outcomes
Understand the various methods and strategies for employing memory in personal writing.
Develop strategies, techniques, and methods for a generative writing practice.
Become familiar with a breadth of writers using public space as a source material for their practices.
To gain a deeper appreciation of one’s lived experience and surroundings.
Develop writing strategies rooted in observation, memory, personal experience, and the reclamation of attention.
Week 1: Recollecting Class overview. Discussion of writing techniques and strategies. Exploring personal memory as a foundation for writing.
Week 2: Loitering Hanging out in public space as a means of generating writing and deep noticing.
Week 3: Walking Movement through the landscape as a guide for writing and thought.
Week 4: Browsing How shopping, browsing, and objects serve as prompts for memory, internal dialogue, and narrative.
Week 5: Commuting The boredom of transit, its constraints, and the writing it can produce.