The Places you will Go

I would like you to write an blog/essay about a place. Your piece will be written & published in this medium with the eponymous name Medium.

Your piece is to be a multimedia piece, taking full advantage of the capabilities of the website, linking words to other sites, incorporating images and/or video, pulling sentences from your text for emphasis as teaser quotations.

The place could be any place — a city, a room, or a secret wood. Write about a particular “outdoor” place, whether it’s a large place, like a farmer’s market or like the Sleeping Bear Dunes, or a small place, like a rock in the middle of a river or a pond you might know well.

Or a really small place like the interior of a mitochondrion (the guts of a smart watch?)

Or write about an urban place — a city, a restaurant, a neighborhood, an alley,

Seattle’s Gum Wall at Pike Street Market

a building, or a room. Write about what it was like to be a child in your home or to be a teenager in an uncomfortable place. You can be a participant.

You may use first person, second person, third person, or an animal(?!!?)in your narration (this would be hard to pull off, but,please, no kittens!).

You could even take us into a fictional place, like Lyra’s Oxford or Hamlet’s castle (different stage representations of?), Dante’s Hell, or Max’s bedroom.

Max’s room; Where the Wild Things Are

The purpose of writing about a place is to say something about it or about the people that go there or that don’t go there; your purpose is not merely to describe a place for the sake of description! You want to provoke your readers to think, to muse upon the place you write about, and to think about the significance of what you say for their own lives. As you consider the purpose of your piece, think about the following possibilities:

Some, but not all of your options. You might have a better idea.

It will help if you have a very specific audience in mind — imagine yourself writing a letter to specific people that you know or to imagine yourself writing to the readers of a particular magazine. Think about what would you could tag in the blog, about what might make people want to share this. There will be a prize for the person who gets the most “likes.”

In whatever you write, you should strive for the unusual, whether in subject or in angle. Remember that readers like to read about places, but that what they like is something fresh, something that reveals the place in a way that they hadn’t before seen it or something that shows them something useful about the place. Use concrete language and try for vivid descriptions; try to show the reader your place instead of merely telling about it.

Look around at magazines to get ideas. Just about every magazine has articles on places, and there are as many approaches to an assignment like this as there are places. And if the topic shifts while you’re writing, don’t worry about it (even if the place becomes secondary to some other focus).

How long? Let’s say 614–897 words, but, then, as folks say, a picture counts for a thousand words, so hmm, ask me if you have questions.

Deadlines?

Nov. 23 M Introduction to this online platform; Zoom session

Nov. 30 M Strategies of Multimedia Rhetoric; Zoom session

Dec. 2 W Workshop: Draft of place blog; Zoom session

Dec. 4 F Blog due; publication & evaluation