Oliver Baez Bendorf – Writing with the Land: Embodiment, Place, and Form (January 2025)

This lecture explores how physical landscapes and environments—whether directly experienced, remembered, or imaginatively reinterpreted—shape creative writing across genres. Place is not just a backdrop but a force that grounds narrative, lyricism, and emotional resonance in embodied experience. Drawing on writers like Tiana Clark, Vievee Francis, Lucas de Lima, Rivers Solomon, Juliana Delgado Lopera, and Lorine Niedecker, we’ll explore how creative work can be rooted in the physical world while allowing space for imaginative transformation. We’ll also consider how place influences not only what we write but how we write, encouraging experimentation with structure and form to reflect the landscapes we inhabit. A short generative exercise will invite participants to write from the landscapes of their own lives, blending sensory presence with creativity.