CURRENTS: Sally Shivnan

The Dresher Center’s CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

Taking Notes, Taking Pictures: Turning Details of Place into Works of Fiction

Sally Shivnan, Teaching Professor, English; Summer 2024 Dresher Center Fellow

Stories that do not happen somewhere end up seeming to happen nowhere, an unsatisfying experience for readers, but capturing settings in writing involves more than sketching colorful descriptions. Place in storytelling is about the relationships between people and the points in space they inhabit; landscapes affect people and people affect landscapes, contributing to the wondrous variety we see in culture, history, and daily life around the world. Like many aspects of writing, evoking a place is “detail work.” Sally Shivnan will share the details she collected in words and photos on trips to France and Florida, a methodology that comes from her background in travel writing, although she uses it now in her fiction. She will also share examples from various authors who engage with place in their own works set in these same locations, as part of examining how writers turn the raw data of observation into sentences and stories.

~~~~~~~