By Aaron Hamburger
In January 2010, I was lucky enough to serve as a faculty member at our Stonecoast in Ireland residency, in the atmospheric fishing village of Howth.
Given our spectacular setting, I decided our workshop should begin by exploring the use of place in fiction. On our first day, we wrote down “see, smell, taste, hear, touch” in the margins of a notebook, then went for a walk to collect as many details as we could for each category. There was one caveat: We could not talk.
Upon our return, we pooled the results of our walk: green lichen growing on damp stone, the complaining cries of sea gulls swooping over a ruined church, the sizzle and smell of cod frying in a fish and chips shop. I then invited the students to take that same slow, thoughtful stroll through the worlds of the stories they’d submitted and see if they could come up with details of similar depth and poetry. Continue reading
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