This assignment asks you to imitate both the content and the style of Open City. Imitation is a form of analysis. It requires you to understand the creative processes that went into the source text, and to exercise your own creative faculties in making something new.

For this post, take a walk of at least 30 minutes (longer, if possible). This can be in any neighborhood, in any borough. It can begin or end in public transit, or it can be a walk from and to your home (try not to retrace your steps, though). Do not walk with a goal in mind—don’t go get groceries, or commute—but instead meander, wander, walk for the sake of walking. You may walk at night, in the daytime, in any weather. As you move through space, take note of what you see, how the air fills, what people you encounter. Take note, too, of your own thoughts: what trains of thought are moving inside your mind, as your body moves through the city? And what’s the relationship between your inward experience, and the outward world?

Within forty-eight hours of taking your walk, write a few paragraphs (at least 500 words) recounting the experience in as much detail as possible. Try to capture with precision your own very particular experiences, but also to draw on Teju Cole’s style in order to do so. Be artful: Cole layers the inner and the outer carefully, creatively. This is not an outpouring of random thoughts and impressions (though it may appear to be so at times); rather, it is an extended meditation on the shifting relationship of the individual to the city. Be open, and see what the city says to you.

This assignment’s aim is to allow you to recreate—as your own—the interplay of inner life (feeling, memory, thought) and outward world (city streets, subways, weather) that structures Cole’s novel.

After you’ve taken your walk, drop a marker on the map assigned to your name’s layer as well as the “Walking” layer. Since you are dropping a marker on a single place, choose a place that was on your walk, and write a tiny bit in your marker content area about why you chose this particular place from the walk.