Sally Shivnan to Present for the Dresher Center's CURRENTS lunch series on February 17
Advanced registration by February 12 required for lunch at this event.
On Monday, February 17 at noon, teaching professor Sally Shivnan will deliver a talk about storytelling and place titled, "Taking Notes, Taking Pictures: Turning Details of Place into Works of Fiction," for the spring semester CURRENTS series. Shivnan provided some context for her talk:
"As someone who has done a lot of travel writing, I've always been fascinated with the ways that multi-sensory perceptions of place translate into words. In my creative writing classes, we look at the relationships characters have to their environments, and ways of capturing details of place that show those relationships. My presentation will focus in part on some travel I did this past summer, which was funded by my summer Dresher Center fellowship and gave me detail-rich settings for my current writing project."
The full event description can be found below.
The Dresher Center’s CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting. This CURRENTS event will be held in person in PAHB 216, but people may also attend virtually.
To register / RSVP for this event, please use the Dresher Center's event page linked here. You can find the Webex link on this page if you'd like to attend virtually. If you want to reserve a spot for lunch in PAHB 216, you must register by February 12.
We hope to see you there, whether in person or virtually!
Taking Notes, Taking Pictures: Turning Details of Place into Works of Fiction
Sally Shivnan, Teaching Professor, English; Summer 2024 Dresher Center FellowStories 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.
Posted: February 4, 2025, 4:11 PM
