Writing and Place

In this course, we will read and write poetry and fiction concerned with place. Taking seriously Emily Dickinson’s “For Occupation - This -” from her poem “I dwell in possibility” we will enter the rooms and furniture of works by canonical and contemporary writers, including your classmates, naming and borrowing strategies from all. How might our everyday lives in place already be the stuff of epic poems? In what ways is a house, like a poem, a metaphor for memory? How might a very exotic and opulent story be home? How is a table of contents a towering city? The poems and stories we encounter will confirm, challenge, and extend our ideas of what takes place within a piece of creative writing, and the work you write in response will continue to make place for possibilities to dwell.