The Muse & The Marketplace 2024

What is the effect of place on childhood and adolescence? This craft session focuses on using place and setting to craft a social portrait about young people growing up too fast, too hard, too weird, too tenderly around the globe. We'll explore what makes for a rich coming-of-age narrative rooted in the socioeconomic, political, natural, and personal layers of place. We'll sample readings with a global focus, from working class towns of volcanic northern Tenerife to squatter apartments in Beijing, from a desolate eastern French town corroded by alcohol to the rooftops and cafés of Mexico City, from 1990s Burundi to the tundra of the Canadian arctic. We will discuss the craft elements of making place not only a believable setting, but a rich, compelling driving force in a narrative, and at times a unique character in and of itself—using tools of social realism, surrealism, historical research, linguistic vernacular, and much more.