This workshop will help students write journalism and essays about place—whether it is a place dear to them personally or one they are curious about. We will look at four elements of writing place—sensory description, people, history, and memory—and how they work together to allow writers and journalists to sharpen their reporting and thoughts on a physical location. We will look at how conflict between these elements offers nonfiction and journalistic literary tension. And we will work together to enable you to take the first steps in writing a nonfiction piece of your own about place.

Matthew Davis is the author of the forthcoming (in November 2025) A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore. His previous books are When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale, and the children’s book The Magic Horse Fiddle. His essays and journalism have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, among other places. He’s been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He founded the Cheuse Center for International Writers at George Mason University in 2016 and was its founding director from 2016-2023.