Course Title: Centering Place: Writing the Settings that Shape Us
Instructor: Gabriella Fee, A&S '22 (MFA)
Brought to you by Odyssey
August 27, 2025 - October 1, 2025
Wednesdays, 7:00PM - 9:00PM ET (6 Sessions)
Virtual via Zoom
Course Description: How do you write about a place that's a part of you? How do you write about a place you've only visited once? In this course we'll read, discuss, and generate writing that puts place at its center. We'll deepen our understanding of the relationship between place and the internal world, and hone our ability to express this relationship in writing.
Whether you're interested in memoir, travel writing, or simply rooting your poetry and fiction more deeply in a sense of place, this course will introduce you to a chorus of writers thinking deeply about where they are, where they've been, and where they're going.
We'll read and analyze works concerned with homeland and exile, with domesticity, with travel, with the concept of the flaneur, and with all the pleasure, longing, and unrest that characterize our relationship to the places that matter to us. We'll think about the homes we make in the natural world, in the built world, in other people, and even in our bodies. We'll discuss the role of memory in writing about place, the physical and emotional landscapes we inherit from our families, and the ways we depart from, return to, and define ourselves in relation to those landscapes.
Course texts will vary across time and genre: stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, Lauren Groff, and Edward P. Jones; poems by Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Gloria Anzaldúa; and essays by Zadie Smith, Annie Dillard, and Richard Hugo (to name a few). We'll read with an ear toward the specific formal and narrative strategies these writers employ to render place and setting in all its vivid complexity. We'll get in the weeds together, thinking collectively about how even small syntactical and structural decisions can sharpen our writing and make a place that is "real" for the writer "real" for the reader as well.
You'll have the chance to create original work via topical in-class writing prompts, and if you are already in the midst of a project you'd like to continue, you'll be encouraged to expand and revise it with the option of feedback from your instructor and classmates.
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Johns Hopkins Tuition Remission Policies
Johns Hopkins alumni, staff, faculty and their spouse or domestic partners are eligible for tuition remission for Odyssey lifelong learning courses. Select the correct ticket pricing during registration. If we cannot confirm your eligibility, you will be requested to pay the full registration price for the course. Eligibility details can be found here.
Withdrawals & Refunds:
If a course is canceled or closed, the registrant is notified immediately, and a full refund is processed automatically unless another course is requested. Registrants who wish to withdraw from an active course must complete the online Odyssey Refund Request Form. Attach any documentation to support your request (e.g., medical documentation, family crisis documentation, etc.).
- 100% refund: Prior to the start of the course and after the first class.
- No refunds: After the first week of each course unless in exceptional cases.
For single-session courses:
100% refundable within two (2) business days of the event.
Please note, refunds apply only to the tuition portion of an Odyssey participant’s charges and are not applicable to any fees or gifts made to the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association. Registrants will be notified by email if a refund is approved within five (5) business days.
