In this graduate seminar, we will read and examine all manner of writing that puts place at its center. We will think about maps, landscape, aerial surveys and photographs, tiny microplots, vast ecosystems, travel narrative, essays of urban flânerie, exile, and homelands. Think: Joan Didion, Dionne Brand, Jamaica Kincaid, Assia Djebar, Walter Benjamin, Glenn Gould, Tanya Tagaq, and Kim Thuy.

We will think about land, water, and air and how writers explore, interact, and dream about each.

We will think about what place writing as methodology or writing philosophy might look like.

Of course, we will write our own texts of place, in our own ways, whatever they may be.