week 1:WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

Everybody comes from somewhere, but how much has your hometown affected who you are today? In our first meeting, we’ll go back to our beginnings and consider where we were born, where we grew up, and who we’ve become in relation to our personal and emotional geographies. There's a lot to write about...

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week 2: THE TOWN & THE CITY

Are you a city mouse or a country mouse? And what kind of topographies do we need at different times in our lives? This week, we’ll think, talk and write about the different places we’ve lived, why we went to them, and the phases of life that tie us to certain locations. We’ll consider who gets to belong in different locales, who gets pushed out, and how/why the demographics of towns, cities and countrysides evolve over time.

 

week 3: PORTRAITS OF LANDSCAPES

 

How do you respond to mountains, oceans, deserts, forests, suburbs, skyscrapers and strip malls? What kind of backdrop do you need in order to feel comfortable, to think clearly, to be happy? This week we’ll consider climate, transportation, gentrification, ancestral homelands, languages, and how landscapes can bring communities together or hold them apart. We'll write about the ways the land itself impacts us.

 

week 4: INTERIOR DESIGN

 

Are you an indoor kind of person who likes being surrounded by objects, routines, and comfort? Or do you live mostly outside, returning home only to change your clothes, shower and sleep?  We’ll think about rooms as extensions of the self and the ways we try to turn spaces between walls into our homes. We’ll also consider the imaginary geographies we build for ourselves online, and how the internet has blurred the boundaries between private interiors and public space. By this point, we should be building up a nice, little collection of writing.

 

week 5: SHOULD I... MOVE HERE?

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This week we’ll step into the lives we almost lived—the sliding doors moments, paths not taken, the places where we once said, “Should I move here?”  We’ll think about the allure of ideal lives and dream homes, as well as the bittersweet imaginings of what might have been. We’ll consider how fantasy can shape our sense of self just as powerfully as reality, and investigate the parallel lives that shadow our own.

 

week 6: THE SHAPE OF LIFE TO COME

 

In our final week together, we’ll look forward. What will our lives look like in the future, and what role will place play in shaping them? Who will we become if we live somewhere else? And will it ever be possible to live close to all our friends and family? We’ll explore our visions of the years to come—whether utopian, dystopian, or somewhere in between—and imagine how we might build futures where we can feel at home in the world.