The World is a Carpet

I am considering a WRIT course, called “Wanderlust and Design,” a sort of Heideggerean project in wonder and discovery in writing. We would trace the act of investigating ideas as a process that does not systematically press on toward a goal but, rather, takes its time to savor the details and to investigate varied perspectives, a process that stops to take measure and to dwell in possibility. Following roads that lead on to roads, we would do close readings of several texts  by writers who “suss out” such things as history and landscape, motorcycles and rhetoricians, carp and Conrad, women and thread. We would examine the inter-disciplinary approach they adopt in order to “curate” a piece of writing by tracing their research, their narratorial stance, their critiques of culture, and their rhetorical choices. We would attempt to determine the way they are able to coax out the unseen within the seen, the imponderable within the pedestrian. And even as we work we would be asking ourselves, also “What in the end makes this inter-disciplinary ‘wanderlust’ writing strategy so interesting?” “How does good writing both persuade and inspire?”