Writing the City with Daniel Saldaña París

Writing the City is a four-session generative writing workshop that explores how cities—both real and imagined—shape our sense of self and narrative. Drawing from philosophy, urban theory, and literature, the workshop invites participants to rethink what it means to inhabit and describe an urban space. Through guided readings and exercises, we’ll consider how writers have turned the city into a stage for memory, conflict, and imagination.

Each session focuses on a different mode of engaging with the city: Attention, Imagination, Research, and Character. We begin by cultivating attention through dérives and other strategies for noticing what usually goes unseen in the urban landscape. From there, we’ll use imagination to construct and distort cities—real, fictional, utopian, or dystopian—and examine how narrative turns spatial experience into temporal movement. Research will deepen this engagement, as we explore archives, neighborhoods, and conversations to uncover the stories embedded in local geographies. Finally, we’ll approach the city through character, tracing how individual voices and lives reflect and reshape their surroundings.

Designed for writers of fiction, essays, and hybrid forms, Writing the City offers a framework for thinking about urban life as a narrative field. Participants will leave each session with new writing inspired by observation, investigation, and readings—texts that translate the complexity of the city into story. By the end of the workshop, the city will no longer be merely a backdrop but an active presence, a living text waiting to be read and rewritten.

Course Outline:

• Session 1 — Attention: Learning to perceive the city anew. We begin by tuning our attention to the rhythms, silences, and overlooked details that make up urban life. Drawing on writers and thinkers such as Guy Debord, Rebecca Solnit, and Walter Benjamin, we’ll consider how perception shapes narrative. Participants will take part in a guided dérive—a walking drift through the city—to collect impressions, sounds, and fragments that will later form the seed of a story. Outcome: A short observational text or notebook entry that translates space into narrative presence.
• Session 2 — Imagination: Transforming perception into invention. This session explores how imagination allows writers to alter, distort, or reconfigure the cities they know. Through readings from Italo Calvino, Teju Cole, and Elizabeth Hardwick, we’ll examine how the urban landscape can be fictionalized, turned inside out, or projected into the future. Participants will map or design a fictional city and write a scene that captures its atmosphere through a character’s movement or perspective. Outcome: A short piece set in an imagined or reimagined city, blending reality and invention.
• Session 3 — Research: The city as archive and fieldwork. We’ll discuss research as a creative practice—using historical materials, interviews, and interviews to uncover stories hidden in the city’s layers. Inspired by Latin American crónicas and essays by Joan Didion and Valeria Luiselli, participants will choose a neighborhood, street, or type of local business to investigate, gathering notes, voices, and textures. Outcome: A draft of a short nonfiction or hybrid text rooted in place-based research.
• Session 4 — Character: The individual as a mirror of the city. The final session centers on people who embody the contradictions and the spirit of the urban environment. We’ll discuss how character can stand for the collective, the neighborhood, or a moment in the city’s evolution. Drawing from interviews and in dialogue with photography, participants will write a portrait or story that fuses character and setting into a single, dynamic image. Outcome: A complete profile or vignette in which the city and its inhabitants are inseparable.

Teaching Style: In this workshop, we’ll move between close observation, imaginative experiment, and research-based writing to uncover the narratives hidden in urban life. My teaching style is conversational and generative. I offer prompts, readings, and feedback that invite discovery rather than prescription. By the end, participants will leave with new writing grounded in place, sharper attention to their surroundings, and a renewed sense of how the city can speak through story.

Level: Introductory

This course is held online via Zoom.