
Placed
“Place,” writes the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, “exists at different scales. At one extreme a favorite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole earth.”
 Placed will address relationships to place, very broadly defined: the body is a place, the earth is a place, a favorite chair is a place, a city, a café, a corner shop, a cubicle, a lake, a mountain, a road. Placed is interested in work that addresses place on any scale, from the banal to the sublime, and that stretches beyond simple description to use place as a springboard to explore or weave together other ideas and stories.
 Essays are likely to address, in various ways, certain kinds of questions: how do we form and maintain and describe relationships to places? How do we develop a sense of place? How do we shape places, and how do places shape us?


Off Assignment Presents Letter to a Stranger: Karachi, Pakistan
Letter to a Stranger is the response to a simple question: “Who haunts you?” This essay was originally featured in Off Assignment. was nine…

People Mountain, People Sea
ne woman wanted out, but no one was sure which way was out. Someone was trying to direct people: the stage is that way,…

Reading Bashö in the Suburbs
Don’t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought. – Bashö[1] ain drips through the pines in the backyard, shushes…

Desolation is KEY
The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love. You think…

Over the Mountains
Serbia. For me: baklava, sarma, palacinke, family, roots, the old country. For the uninitiated: a small landlocked country in southeastern Europe separated from the rest of the continent by the Danube river in the north, and from the Mediterranean by the Alps in the west.

Claim
NOLA is name is Cub and he’s sitting on the sidewalk with a pile of books and a typewriter. On my first pass down…

Leave to Remain
When I was younger I used to fantasize about having a button I could press that would pause the world around me while I caught my breath, had a nap…

On Running Again
Last Saturday, the first almost-warm day of the year, I went for a run along the river, into town, through the park – a four mile loop in perfect, breezy, sunny conditions.

On Change
A few months ago I started swimming in the morning. I used to think I hated swimming in the morning. I thought: I’m not a morning person.

The Journey in the Song
“All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience,” Leonard Cohen once said, speaking about the process of songwriting. But as a listener…

On Not Writing (About Home)
Last week, I arrived in California after a year-long absence. It was hot in England and I felt a little bad to leave it behind just as summer was blooming…