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This workshop has been cancelled. We hope to offer it again at a future date.
Your Place: The Unexpected Power of Writing About Place with Brian Dunlap
Explore the elements of the literature of place. Learn how to use the culture, history, and geography of place in narrative and verse—and write stories and poems about YOUR place.
8 Sundays, July 6-August 24. 1:00-3:00 PM PDT on Zoom
Cost: $150 • $250 • $350 (new pay what you can model)
For more information about payment model and to register, please visit: https://tinyurl.com/SummerCraftlab.
Your Place: The Unexpected Power of Writing About Place is designed for those who want to write about a place or their place. As William Faulkner once said, “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”
What is your “little postage stamp of native soil”? Your hometown? Or is it the place where you currently live? Who lives in that place? What is its history? Most importantly, what are its stories?
This workshop introduces students to the basic elements of the literature of place. It explores how to understand and use a place’s history in narrative and verse, how people talk about place (the language they use), or a specific place and the cultures that make up its identity. Along the way, students will pen stories or poems about the place they want to write about.
Brian Dunlap is a native Angeleno capturing the city’s stories hidden in plain sight. He is the author of the chapbook Concrete Paradise (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and the winner of a Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from december magazine judged by former Los Ángeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodríguez. His poems, book reviews, and nonfiction have been published in PacificREVIEW, L.A. Parent, Compulsive Reader, Our California from California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick, and the anthology Reimagine America (Vagabond, 2022), among others. He’s the Editor-in-Chief of Los Angeles Literature, an online magazine covering the Greater Los Ángeles literary community.
