This five-week generative writing workshop uses public space as a prompt for new creative work.

We’ll explore how everyday activities—walking, loitering, shopping, commuting—can generate material for new writing. Public environments like sidewalks, parks, and subway stations become places where memory, attention, and story intersect. These observations will become the foundation for meditative episodes, digressive accounts, and stream-of-consciousness vignettes that trace the interplay between outer world and inner life.

Sessions include three parts:

• Time spent in public space gathering material
• A focused in-class writing period with prompts
• Optional sharing and discussion.

This class is open to writers and artists of all levels who are curious about the relationship between attention, movement, and narrative.

We’ll draw inspiration from short, optional readings by writers such as Nicholson Baker, Teju Cole, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, and W.G. Sebald.

By the end of the course, you’ll leave with a body of new writing, sharpened observational tools, strategies for gathering material, and a renewed awareness of how the world around you can shape your creative practice.

• Develop writing strategies rooted in observation, memory, personal experience, and intentional attention.
• Strengthen your ability to translate sensory experience into language.
• Gain a deeper appreciation for your lived experience and everyday surroundings.
• Establish sustainable habits to support a long-term writing practice.
• Become familiar with writers who use public space as source material.
• Experiment with form—exploring digression, fragmentation, and stream-of-consciousness as tools for narrative.
• Connect with a community of fellow writers exploring similar themes.

Week 1 – Recollecting

Class overview, introductions, and show and tell. We will discussion writing techniques and strategies for generating material.

Week 2 – Walking

Movement through the landscape as a guide for writing and thought.

Week 3 – Loitering

Hanging out in public space as a means of generating writing and deep noticing.

Week 4 – Browsing

How shopping, browsing, and objects serve as prompts for memory, internal dialogue, and narrative.

Week 5 – Commuting

The boredom of transit, its constraints, and the writing it can produce.

Open City by Teju Cole
The Mezzanine by Nicholson
Baker Mrs. Dalloway by Virigina Woolf
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

Alex Wolfe is an artist and writer from Iowa, living in New York City. His writing and photography explore the relationship between movement, the built environment, and memory.

His work is held in the collections of the New York Public Library and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, and has been featured in Grist, Untapped Journal, and NPR.

He has guest lectured and led walks for institutions and organizations including Princeton University, the Swiss Institute, Salomon, the Municipal Art Society of New York, Index, and Parsons School of Design.

He writes the newsletter Pedestrian and is completing his first novel, a fictional account of his 180-mile walk from Brooklyn to Philadelphia.

Index scholarships are designed to benefit underrepresented groups, BIPOC members of our community, and those for whom the class price is not accessible. These need-based scholarships will go to the candidates who best demonstrate why they should be chosen for the free spot to our class based on the following criteria:

• Belong to groups that are traditionally underrepresented in the graphic design and creative industries
• Do not have jobs that would pay for these courses as professional development
• Cannot independently afford the class at list price
• Share our value of intentional community

The number of selected applicants chosen is subject to the discretion of Index and the instructor, but every course will select at least one. Apply for a scholarship here. Applications close April 14th.

We get that things come up, but we rely on headcounts in our programs to survive as a business. If you request a refund...

More than 4 weeks before offering begins → 100% refund

More than 2 weeks before offering begins → 50% refund

Fewer than 2 weeks before offering begins → No refund

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