Where We're From

On thinking about place

Hi friends.

Greetings from Key West, where I have returned for the week to teach at the Key West Literary Seminar. I am delighted to be back in the sunshine, and am considering this a bonus round after my incredible time here for the PEAR residency. I’m counting myself already lucky in 2026.

In December I put together a bunch of new workshop blocks for this four-day conference, generating more than ten thousand words of thinking on topics related to writing our origin stories, whether for memoir or more autobiographical fiction. I’ve been thinking about our own personal origin stories, ways into them through various themes, our relationship with our boundaries (and the boundaries of people we know), the aboutness of our work, and how to extend our origin stories into the future. Considering the work I’ve put into my novel edit alongside the workshop development, it has been a busy and thoughtful time. I feel revved up.

I’m going to try and share some just a little bit of the work I’ve done for this workshop week here and there for my subscribers. We’ll start today with thinking about place.