I was prompted to reflect in some artistic way what “urban” means to me. “City By the Sidewalk” is what I came up with. I developed a writing exercise out of this short story.

City By the Sidewalk

Paint a scene from an odd perspective. You can describe anything, but do so from a perspective you wouldn’t normally choose, one that makes you uncomfortable. This exercise forces you to broaden your perspective and to describe things in a way that is foreign to you. Below is an original of mine (wrote this in McGrail’s class). I decided to describe an urban city from its reflection in a pothole:

“The lights from the street lamps, from the line of brick shacks, lights from the high-rise buildings look up at us from the puddled potholes in the street. There’s a layer of oil in the pothole puddle and you can see the bottom of your foot’s multicolored reflection. You learn to keep your head down on certain streets, and eventually you remember the places in the sidewalk where there is no more sidewalk or where it’s all caved in. You’ll sometimes wonder what could have possibly happened to make the sidewalk completely bashed in right there. Sometimes you’ll zoom in and focus on these cracks and crevices or try to step over them and a body will jump out at you. Well, the body doesn’t actually jump out at you, but you’ll be walking like a zombie looking at cracks in the sidewalk and then BAM there’s a body…a person…a freaking human being…sleeping in between the side of a building and a dumpster.”

“City By the Side Walk” By Chelsey Cashwell