I had the pleasure of joining Dr. Catalina Florescu’s creative writing students at Pace University over Zoom this week, for a short workshop on how concrete detail, and the way we select and sequence it, creates distinct emotional experiences for readers.
I opened the class by reading “Sarajevo on the Phone,” a prose poem of mine about longing and displacement, written after my parents called me from our native city, where they had returned together after twenty years.
We talked about how a first draft is often an act of laying down all the concrete details, the sensory impressions, the textures of a place or a moment. The work of revision is then one of selecting or finding the details that carry the most emotional weight, the ones that get closest to the experience and guide the reader through it most faithfully.
Then the students wrote. The prompt was to choose a place from their past—a building, a room, a street, a natural setting—and imagine someone they know is calling them from there. What do they imagine the person on the line is experiencing? What is the person feeling, hearing, smelling?
When volunteers read aloud, their pieces were strikingly different from one another, some deeply place-based, some rhythmic, one grief-filled, one focused on the dynamic between two people. I was struck by how fully formed each voice already was.
We talked about how much one discovers by simply following a detail or image to see where it leads. One student commented that she had not before slowed down enough to realize what a place she remembered evoked for her and that this exercise brought up feelings she didn’t know were there.
Thanks, Dr. Florescu, for this lovely invitation.
Lana Spendl 