Writing Your Place
Instructor: Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo
How does the world around you- your lived environment, your home, your city, even your body- shape the way you write? Do places function as backdrops to the main plot in your story, or are they central characters in their own right? How can you make sense of your relationship to places and spaces, both real and imagined, through reading and writing fiction?
In this workshop, we use creative writing as a lived practice of making meaning to explore a central question: how does place function in fiction, and how do characters navigate emotions such as desire, longing, loss, and love in relation to the spaces they inhabit and their own sense of self?
To see how some of the most compelling contemporary writers approach place, we will study a range of authors, from Olga Tokarczuk to Rachel Cusk, who create rich characters shaped by their relationship to their environments. In these stories, both public and private spaces become complex, breathing presences in their own right. These readings will encourage students to think about the environments they move through in their daily lives- cities, streets, rooms, buses, rickshaws, sidewalks, cafés, and more, and to explore how those places shape who they become in those spaces.
Through creative writing exercises, students will explore whether these places expand or limit their sense of self, their capacity for freedom, and their creative expression. In this workshop, writing becomes a site of reinvention- a practice that invites students to move beyond the spatial constraints of their lives. By reimagining place in inventive ways, they begin to see spaces not as background but as central characters in both their writing and their lives.
About Aneeqa
Aneeqa Wattoo is a writer and translator based in Lahore, Pakistan. She was awarded the Sir Anwar Pervez-University of Oxford Graduate Scholarship to pursue an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research and writing explore themes of motherhood, personal freedom and the politics of space in Pakistan. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various local and international literary journals including Meridian, McNeese Review, New Ohio Review, New Plains Review, Southern Humanities Review, Dawn and Lakeer Magazine among others. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and she is the Founder of The Creative Room, an interdisciplinary humanities platform for online learning focused on South Asia. She is the host of a podcast, Unpacking Pakistan- Discourses about the Culture, Politics and Economy of Pakistan at Lahore University of Management Sciences.