How to Write About Place

a public syllabus

For over eleven years, I have had the great fortune of teaching university students how to write. It’s a job I wasn’t particularly interested in when I was given my first class at the University of Utah in 2011 in exchange for my small graduate student living stipend during my master’s program. But it’s a job I have come to love deeply, and one I feel continually honored to undertake. This coming semester, I am designing and teaching a new class (one I’ve never taught before) about placemaking. 

Over the last year and a half, my collaborators and I have used our newsletter as a way to make place, which is to say, we have written about and photographed and reflected on the very particular place that is our neighborhood of East Hollywood. The place exists with or without us, but in documenting it, in interviewing its inhabitants, and in reflecting on its past, present, future, we are creating a repository of work that frames East Hollywood, points at it, says here, in this location, among these people, there are things to see and know and remember. 

Placemaking can take many shapes: documenting, memorializing, also actively building and shaping. The scope of place making can be wide (think, a whole city or a whole nation state) or it can be narrow (think writing about your grandmother’s kitchen and how your experiences there weave together architecture, aesthetics, food, memory, family history, cultural context, and social connections). 

This coming fall, I will charge my students with the task of thinking about and enacting placemaking about whatever places are important to them. And I wanted to share with you all, our wonderful readers, a portion of the syllabus that I am going to be giving to my students, because I don’t believe education should be confined to expensive institutions and because I want the work of place making to feel accessible to as many people as possible. 

My syllabus is small and focused. The semester, for the most part, is split into three major essay assignments: 1) analyzing the ways in which artists and writers depict place, 2) comparing multiple differing depictions of the same place, and 3) writing a personal narrative about a chosen place that reflects all the knowledge students accumulate from dissecting the many different approaches others have taken to place making. 

Our class will be primarily focused on Los Angeles, as the students on this campus tend to have a somewhat siloed experience of the city, so I want to push them to think beyond the university’s walls. But you will also notice some works that center on other places in the U.S. My students come from all over the world, so I will also be encouraging them to bring to class depictions of places that interest them so that we can collectively build a larger atlas to work with.

There are two kinds of readings/viewings I will be asking students to engage with. One kind will be artifacts of placemaking—books, feature films, short films, television episodes, journalism, academic essays. The second kind will be a mix of craft essays (essays about writing) and interviews about placemaking projects.

If you like the work we do in this newsletter, I think you would very much enjoy the placemaking examples I am sharing below, and if you are yourself interested in starting or continuing to write about place, you might also check out the craft essays (I am using this term loosely) and interviews that I list at the bottom of this post. The more people who make work about the places that matter to them, the better chance we all have at connecting more thoroughly and more consciously to our surroundings and to each other.

Section I: Analyzing Depictions of “Home”

“The War for Home,” a short film featuring the recently deceased Spanto

The Last Black Man in San Francisco, dir. Joe Talbot (this is, hands down, my favorite film of all time)

Reservation Dogs, the pilot episode of the 2021-2023 television series

Section II: Comparing Depictions of Los Angeles

Joan Didion’s essay, “Goodbye to All That”

Mike Davis’ essay, “Fortress LA” (which I wrote about briefly earlier this year)

Samanta Helou Hernandez’s essay (for our very own newsletter), “The Fight for L.A.'s Last Japanese Boarding House”

Section III: Writing Your Own Place

Michelle García’s essay, “Death of a Dream”

Jamaica Kincade’s short book, A Small Place

Denis Wood’s collection of maps, Everything Sings

Jennifer Renteria’s essay, “The Starlite Swap Meet”

Brandon Harris’ essay, “Bed-Stuy”

Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Open Door”

Craft Essays: Interviews and Reflections on Writing and the Writing Process

Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”

Matthew Salesses, “Audience, Theme, And Purpose”

Elina Shatkin, “The Hater's Guide To Reading About LA In The New York Times”

Kristen Arnett, “The Problem with Writing about Florida”

Phillip Lopate, “Research and Personal Writing”

Nicole Walker, “The Braided Essay as Social Justice Action”

Matthew Salesses, “What is Craft? 25 Thoughts”

Brenda Miller & Suzanne Paola, “‘Taking Place:’ Writing the Physical World”

n+1 podcast, Episode 17: City by City

Alexander Chee, “The Writing Life”

Barry Lopez, “Landscape and Narrative”

If you have any favorite works of writing or art that center around place, please feel free to share them with others in the comments!