Session One · Unit One — The Threshold
The Lobby — Writing Place
The Genre: The Place Essay
Handouts & Worksheets
Main Points of the Lesson
- Nonfiction is shaped truth. Creative nonfiction uses the tools of fiction — scene, image, voice, structure — in service of what actually happened. The contract with the reader is the whole genre.
- Place is never only scenery. A place essay is about the relation between a person and a place: what the place has done to the writer, and what the writer brings to it.
- The sensory inventory. Before meaning comes noticing. Sight is the lazy sense; sound, smell, temperature, and texture make a place real.
- Our building is a text. 2601 was designed by Paul Philippe Cret with Aaron Colish, opened in 1939, and carries in its lobby a New Deal tile mural called The History of Shelter. A building that tells the history of shelter is a good place to learn to write.
- The walker’s eye. Woolf’s “Street Haunting” shows how a walk becomes an essay: the mind moves outward to the street and inward to the self, and the essay is the record of that motion.
Reading for Class — Click to Open
- Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure — read the Newberry Library PDF
Woolf goes out in winter to buy a pencil and returns with an essay about the city and the self. - 2601 Parkway Condominium Association, History of 2601 Parkway — read the building’s history page
The architect, the 1939 opening, the terraces, and the lobby mural. Read it as a primary source — and notice what it leaves out. - Textbook: Tell It Slant, Chapter 3, “‘Taking Place’: Writing the Physical World” — see the textbook guide
After Our Discussion — Critical Reception
- Lee Gutkind, “What Is Creative Nonfiction?” (Creative Nonfiction) — The founding editor of Creative Nonfiction defines the genre and its ethical boundaries.
- Paul Philippe Cret — background (Wikipedia) — The Beaux-Arts architect behind 2601, the Rodin Museum, and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
- Fairmount, Philadelphia — neighborhood history (Wikipedia) — Context for the streets we walk every day.
In-Class Writing Prompt — Laptops Closed
Stand (or sit) for five minutes in one spot in this building — the lobby before the mural, the mailroom, an elevator, a window on your floor. Write a sensory inventory: five sounds, three smells, two textures, one temperature, and one thing no one else would notice. Then write one sentence that begins, This place taught me…
Ten minutes, by hand, in your notebook. Do not stop to revise. If you get stuck, write I can hear… and keep going.
What happens with this: nothing is collected. It is yours, written on paper, in your notebook. No one is asked to read aloud who does not wish to.
Discussion Questions
- Woolf leaves the house “to buy a pencil.” Why does an essay about a city need so small a pretext?
- Where in “Street Haunting” does the essay stop describing London and start describing the mind? How can you tell?
- What does the building’s official history emphasize? What kinds of stories does an official history tend to omit — and who could tell them?
- What would a newcomer notice about 2601 that a thirty-year resident no longer sees? Which of those two writers is more reliable?
Homework
- Read Tell It Slant, Chapter 3, and Chapter 8, “The Tradition of the Personal Essay.”
- Write a place essay of 500–750 words: One Room in This Building. It may be your apartment, a room you remember from another life, or a shared space at 2601. Let the place carry a feeling you never name directly.
- Read for Session 2: Christopher Morley, “Moving,” and Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”
For the 2601 Anthology
Your place essay is the first possible contribution to our anthology. Keep it; we will return to it in Session 10.
Before Next Time — Session 2
Moving Day — The Personal Essay. We turn from the place to the person in it: the essayist’s “I,” the art of digression, and the moment an essay turns.