Writing Your Place
Instructor: Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo
How does the world around you- nature, the Earth, your home, your city- affect your way of being and impact the kind of writer you are? Do spaces figure as background characters in your writing or are characters created through their relation with spaces? How can you make sense of your relations with places and spaces, both real and imagined, through reading and writing fiction?
In this workshop, we use creative writing as a practice of meaning-making to explore participants’ relationship with their environment and remake it through the written word. Students will read excerpts of creative nonfiction and fiction to study how writers have successfully used elements of their lived environment in their stories to create setting, build rich characters and depict complex relationships between human beings and the external world.
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 will push students to think about the physical environment they inhabit permanently or liminally- city, country, home, public transport, sidewalks, cafés, parks- and explore how they feel in those places through their writing. Through creative writing done during the workshop, students will explore questions such as whether these places expand or limit expressions of freedom 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 writing places in new, inventive ways and carving new ways of being through creative writing.
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.