Paying Attention [Andrew Palmer]

“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there,” writes J. A. Baker. We’ll practice looking hard at both the natural and the man-made world. We’ll read examples of descriptive writing from H.D., Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Nicholson Baker, Annie Dillard, and others, and we’ll generate examples of our own. We’ll talk about the virtues of giving people, places, and things our careful attention. And we’ll consider how to use description to give depth and texture to narrative writing, whether fiction or nonfiction. Students will come away from the class full of new material to expand upon.