Writing Your Place

Instructor: Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo

 

How does the world around you—nature, the Earth, your home, your city—relate with your inner life and journey as a writer? How can you make sense of your relation with places and spaces, both real and imagined, as a reader and writer of fiction?

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In this workshop, we use creative writing as a practice of meaning-making through which writers explore their current relation with their environment and reimagine it through the written word. Students will read excerpts of fiction and essays to see how writers have successfully used place and space in their stories to enhance setting, create rich characters, and depict complex relationships between human beings and their lived environment.

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Through creative writing exercises done during the workshop, students will explore questions such as whether these places expand or limit expressions of freedom, gendered identity, and creative expression. In this workshop, writing becomes a site of reinvention—a liberating practice that allows students to go beyond spatial constraints in their lives by creating and experimenting with new places, spaces, and ways of being through creative writing.

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The readings used in the workshop feature a diverse selection of brilliant modern Urdu and English fiction writers ranging from Ismat Chughtai to Rachel Cusk, who have created rich characters that come into being through a lived relation with their environment. In these stories, both public and private spaces become complex, breathing characters in their own right. These readings make students think about the physical environment they inhabit permanently or liminally—country, city, homes, forms of public transport, sidewalks, cafés, parks—and explore how they feel and become a ‘self’ in those places through their writing.

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