“Travel narratives are a loose and mongrel form…” So begins Jonathan Raban’s introductory essay in The New Granta Book of Travel, and so begins the reading in Tara FitzGerald’s course, Writing about Place. Through the essay, Tara’s students will be introduced to the term “Psychogeography,” a sort of reading of the landscape that occurs, Raban says, as “we scramble to decode what we can see and smell in order to establish our own place in the world.” Seems like an appropriate first lesson for first-year students, many of them exploring NYC for the very first time.