When I first started teaching Ph.D. students of creative writing, I wasn’t sure how they would take to prompts. I worried that accomplished writers might consider prompt-writing too elementary or proscriptive, but it turns out that you’re never too old or sophisticated to embrace a literary challenge. You’re never too old to play. The proof lies in their success: over the years, my students’ prompt texts have turned up not only in their dissertations, but also as stand-alone essays in literary journals.
In 2020, I faced a pedagogical challenge: my fall place-writing workshop would have to change radically. Given the widespread pandemic lockdowns, I could no longer plan to send my students out into the world as hoped. The class would have to shift its perspective, and we’d need to stick close to home instead.
I re-read the course description I’d submitted months earlier:
In this workshop, we will read, examine, and produce all manner of writing that puts place at its center. We will think about maps, landscape, tiny micro-plots, vast ecosystems, travel narrative, essays of urban flânerie, exile, and homelands. We will think about land, water, and air and how writers explore, interact, and dream about each.
And then I sat down at my desk and started to dream. Soon, I came up with a series of seven prompts for the class, each paired with a place-oriented nonfiction text from our syllabus. I dare say that these prompts still work now that we’re moving around the world again.
Prompt #1: Witnessing Territories (Paired with Assia Djebar’s Algerian White)
Write a letter to place that you know and love that has been scarred in some way. Places suffer all kinds of injuries: think about the effects of war, environmental degradation and climate change, gentrification, neglect, economic collapse, or injustice. Tell it the story of how it used to be, of how it’s changed, and of your hopes for the future of this place.Prompt #2 The Body in Space (Paired with Molly McCully Brown’s Places I’ve Taken My Body)
1. Think about time in relation to your body. How has your body transformed itself or been transformed by others (by violence, medicine, love, pregnancy) over the decades? Describe this transformation.
2. Think about your body in motion and as a vehicle. Where has your body taken you? In what fashion and at what pace?
3. Has your body ever betrayed you?
4. Has your body ever surprised you with its strength or resilience?
5. Write about your body in space. Try to be quiet and to listen to it. See what it remembers.Prompt #3 Mapping Texts (Paired with Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination)
1. Find a map, any map. The only caveat I have is that the map must have some meaning to you. Dig through your car for road maps, do a search of Google maps, pull out an atlas. It can be a map with borderlines, or it can be a topographical map. It can even be a fictional map from a novel or a game.
2. Describe your map. What do you know about its history? Who made it and for what purpose?
3. Where does the map end? What lies beyond its edges?
4. Where do you belong on this map? If you don’t belong on this map, then write about that fact.
5. Hold the map upside down or in some other way that makes it strange. Do you see anything new?
6. Examine any tags or metadata on the map. What are its non-mappy parts?
7. Continue to free-write and see what comes from this experience.
8. Take this map exercise in any direction you want. You may consider:
• doing some further research into mapmaking.
• digging in online archives associated with this map or the place it depicts.
• doing some bibliographical research to help you answer any questions this process may have raised, creating an alternate map of your own that ‘corrects’ any problems you find with the map in question.Prompt #4 The Place Remembered (Paired with Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place)
1. Draw a map of your childhood neighborhood or home, including as many details as possible: streets, houses, trees, playgrounds, and alleys. Include all the places that loom large for children: secret hiding places, scary places, friends’ homes.
2. Use your map as the impetus for writing. Use whatever this exercise stirs up in you to put some words to the page.
3. Consider:
• what you can’t remember
• memories that flood back unexpectedly
• what you’ll never forget
• what you can see in your mind’s eye; what you can hear in your mind’s ear—any rhymes, songs, or childhood mantras that come back
• the details of childhood friends: their faces, their struggles, who they became, whom you’ve lost
• people who seemed mysterious to you as a kid
• any brushes with danger
• places and contexts that made you feel safePrompt #5 Smallness and Stillness (Paired with Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk)
Go outside, not too far from home. Choose a mundane thing that you love. It can be a mailbox, a tree, a rock, a plant, a bird feeder. Sit in a place that feels comfortable to you where you can observe the thing from all sides.1) Write what you see: the light, colors, movement, people.
2) Write what you hear: sounds both natural and unnatural.
3) Write what you smell.Go back to your thing at a second time of day (it need not be the same day)
4) Write what you remember: let the thing move you back into the past.
5) Write why you love this thing or why you chose it if you don’t love it.
6) Write what is different now.Go back to your thing a third time. What you write this time is up to you.
Prompt #6 Place as Palimpsest (Paired with Ryszard Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus)
A palimpsest is an old document on which the original writing has been erased and replaced with new writing or where new writing covers the old.
1. Find an old book, a map, or a cookbook full of pen marks or stained with food. Tell the story about how the blotches or stains may have gotten there. Think about the life story of this book: where has it been? how many owners has it seen? where has it moved? where was it made?
2. Think about the metaphor of the palimpsest and what it means to write new stories over the old ones.
3. How do places function as palimpsests: whether the ways in which cities are rebuilt or when we re-wallpaper a room? What places in your life & history function as palimpsests?Prompt #7 The Place of Autofiction (Paired with Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth)
Autofiction is a literary form that combines the entirely real and the entirely fictional, where authors insert themselves into their own fictions in search of a self, in search of a way out, in search of elusive possibilities. Autofiction is a way for writers to put a process of decolonization onto the page. Experiment with this idea by putting your real self into a fictional (impossible? magical? time-traveling?) scenario or setting. Can you see the advantages of such a move or does the nonfictionist inside you revolt against this exercise? Watch and listen to yourself.You may either:
1) Run with prompt and write your own autofiction, whatever that may be.
or
2) Write and reflect on what stopped you, as a writer, from embracing the project of autofiction.
So, in the end, what did my students and I learn over that Covid fall of writing? What insights did we gain of maps and stillness and place and memory over those months of coming together, apart?
Many of my students traveled back to childhood spaces in their work. In one essay, a narrator sifted through an attic full of beloved objects that included bird nests and tiny rodent carcasses; another reflected on summers spent at a trailer on Florida swampland. A third took readers to a cold medical examination room where doctors had violated his body. He told of how wounds from certain places persist. All our writers paid close attention to the smallest changes in the air, the garden, and on the streets outside. They wrote about water and roads and how languages organize the world. In our weekly meetings, we talked about what we’d lost to our confinement and dreamed about a time when we might travel again.
Looking back, I see now that the strangeness and sadness of that 2020 autumn season gave us all a new view. A new way of reading the terrain. Having stopped dead in our tracks, we suddenly saw our lives anew. In our stillness, we now had the time to think and write in ways that we’d never done before. Fall 2020 flipped our maps upside down. No longer did we ask where to go and by what route (ever forward, always moving) but instead examined the paths and waterways that had brought us here in the first place.
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Julija Šukys (Ph.D., University of Toronto) is the author of three books (Silence is Death, Epistolophilia, and Siberian Exile), one book-length translation (And I burned with shame), and many essays. In her work, Šukys draws on archives, interviews, bibliographical research, and observation to write about everyday lives in war-torn or marginal places, about women’s life-writing, and about the legacy of violence across generations and national borders. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and, in Fall 2022, held the Fulbright Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto.