Write about place

Posted byKendall DunkelbergPosted inEducation, Writing

I have often given my creative writing students the journal assignment to write about a place they remember from when they were 8-13 years old. This seems to work well, since we all have someplace we used to go that holds a lot of memories. The combination of memory and description can be evocative, charging the language and the imagery with emotion.

This time, since we were out with a snow/ice day and because I felt like trying something a little different, I changed the assignment a little. I still asked students to write about a place, but I made it any place they have an emotional attachment to: where you had your first date or your first anything, really, or a place that you visited frequently. I suppose it could be a place that your parents went to and then took you to. I asked them to write without naming the emotion, but trying to evoke the emotion through the language and images they choose. I want to have them do some work together in groups to begin turning these paragraphs into poems about the place, though I won’t mind if the poems then get revised back into a story at some later date.

Published by Kendall Dunkelberg

I am a poet, translator, and professor of literature and creative writing at Mississippi University for Women, where I direct the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, the undergraduate concentration in creative writing, and the Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium. I am Chair of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy, and I have published four collections of poetry, Tree Fall with Birdsong, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as a collection of translations of the Belgian poet Paul Snoek, Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus, and the textbook A Writer's Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing. I was born and raised in Osage, Iowa, and have lived for over thirty years in Columbus, Mississippi, where my wife Kim and I let wildflowers grow in our yard to the delight of spring polinators and only some of our neighbors.

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