The Writer's Studio: Writing Lost Places

The Writer’s Studio is a free workshop series open to all students from all majors. Come study the art of writing in intensive, fun, hands-on workshops with dynamic faculty from the Creative Writing program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and others. You will leave with an expanded understanding of what your writing can do.

So much can be inferred from a place beyond location. A place is a marker of time, and it shows the socioeconomic attribute of a story’s setting. Places change. Old buildings get torn down and new ones are built. Industrial buildings are being remodeled for office spaces. The demographics of people in neighborhoods change. In this workshop we will bring our childhood neighborhood, towns, and cities back to life. We will write from our memories and into the present. We will write of the place no one will ever see again because it has changed. In our writings, these places will be alive.

Ajibola Tolase is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has appeared in American Chordata, LitHub, New England Review, Prairie Schooner,and elsewhere.