As a writer of place I know there are many important and necessary stories about who and what a place is and who the people are that live in that place, those that are never told or stories that are hidden in plain sight, as we go about our day-to-day lives. That’s why I created and continue to teach my first workshop “Los Ángeles: Your City” at venues around Los Ángeles, such as the Hammer Museum, 826LA and the Sims Library of Poetry. I saw too many stories of my home’s—L.Á.’s—BIPOC residence go untold, those historically left out of the city’s narrative in a city and region that is majority nonwhite. I teach “Los Ángeles: Your City” to encourage my fellow Angeleños, especially the city’s BIPOC residence, to write their own L.Á. narratives.
Since then, I’ve created and taught other versions of “Los Ángeles: Your City” and started teaching other creative writing workshops on different topics I find important and I write about.
I’m available to teach the following creative writing workshops I’ve developed or one on a topic of your choice at your organization or as part of an author visit. You can contact me by emailing a detailed summary of your request to b.dunlap2@aol.com.
Los Ángeles: Your City—Two Hour Version
Los Ángeles is a sprawling, diverse city filled with amazing stories. In this workshop, students, through a critical engagement of the course material, explore who and what the city is. The class enters this conversation through the use of movie clips, photos, literature and literary history of Los Ángeles, and through video clips of L.Á. authors discussing how they write their Los Angeles stories if applicable. In the end, this workshop provides the writing techniques and enriched knowledge of Los Ángeles for students to pen their own L.Á. stories from a place of deep understanding.
Los Ángeles: Your City—Eight Week Version
Los Ángeles is a sprawling, diverse city filled with amazing stories. Too many have not been told. In this eight-week workshop, students will learn the tools to write their own Los Ángeles stories in a safe, supportive environment. By workshop’s end, students will be well on their way to depicting their Los Ángeles, from a deep understanding of the city and region, from their unique perspectives.
This workshop introduces students to the essential elements of writing about Los Ángeles, such as the language locals use when talking about the city. As Los Ángeles poet Wanda Coleman once said, “one speaks in minutes, freeway exits, cross streets, landmarks, availability of parking and the desirability of zipcodes and prefixes.” Also, the workshop explores how to understand and use Los Ángeles’ history in narrative or verse. This is all accomplished by using class and group discussions, in-class writing exercises, video interviews from L.Á. writers and reading and discussing poems, short stories and novel excerpts from literature written about or set in and around Los Ángeles.
Your Place
William Faulkner once said, “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”
What is your little postage stamp of native soil? Is it your hometown? The place you live in now? Who lives there? What’s the history of that place? How did that place help shape how you and anyone else views and understands the world? How do people live in that place? Most importantly, what are its stories?
This workshop introduces students to the basic elements of the literature of place. It explores how to understand and use a place’s history in narrative or verse, how people talk about place (the language they use) or a specific place and the cultures that make up the identity of any specific place. At the end students pen stories or poems about where they’re from or about the place they call home.
Writing Is Not A Luxury
This class is a safe space for students to discuss the hard, difficult and important topics, themes and ideas that each student finds essential and are compelled to write about. Students will be pushed to find and confront these topics in a nurturing environment, exploring the importance of and how to write about them, openly and honestly.
In the workshop, students will read and discuss Audre Lourde’s essay, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” answer and discuss questions on why they write, what drives them to write, watch a Reyna Grade video about why and how she writes, and conclude with students taking what they found was most important for them to write about and, with the time remaining in class, turning it into the beginning of one idea that will be a novel, short story, essay, nonfiction book, poem or poetry collection, they will write, with the intent to publish it upon completion.
Brian Dunlap 