Writing in Place w/ Sierra Crane Murdoch

A sense of place,” writes Barry Lopez, “must include, at the very least, knowledge of what is inviolate about the relationship between a people and the place they occupy.” Place is not just the background to our human stories but rather a central relational component of our lives. So what role should place play in our nonfiction writing?

In this online class, through a series of close readings and generative exercises, we’ll examine writers’ varied relationships to place: place as home; place as the unfamiliar; place as somewhere we yearn to go or as a site of danger we flee; places we know intimately and those rendered unrecognizable in our absences. We’ll move between wild and urban landscapes, between confined spaces and vast geographies, as we study how the writer’s connection to place can generate narrative tension and momentum. And we’ll explore notions of belonging amid histories of dispossession: How do we imbue the places we write about with stories that precede or overlap with our own?

This is a discussion-based class with attention to craft. Participants will respond to generative writing prompts and have the opportunity to submit a piece of writing (up to 3,000 words) for individualized written feedback from the instructor. In addition to Lopez, we’ll read Jamaica Kincaid, Alexander Hemon, Eduardo Galeano, Annie Ernaux, Miriam Toews, Natalie Diaz, Joseph Earl Thomas, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and others. Although this class is geared toward nonfiction, writers of any genre are welcome. This 6-week class takes place online using Zoom on Tuesdays from 5-7 p.m. PST from April 14 to May 19, 2026.

Sierra Crane Murdoch is the author of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the winner of an Oregon Book Award, and named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2020 by The New York Times. Her reporting and essays have appeared on This American Life and in Harper’s, as well as in VQR, The Paris Review, The New Yorker online, The Atlantic, and others. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, and she was a recent Kittredge Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. Her second book, Imaginary Brightness: An Autobiography of American Innocence, is forthcoming from Random House.