Mining Mentor Moves to Write About a Place

This is our final post in partnership with the National Writing Project’s Write Out 2026, providing new resources and materials for place-based writing with your students! You can catch up on our previous posts: Exploring the Language of Place and Engaging the Historical Imagination in Place-Based Writing.

I don’t know how to write or how to teach writing without mentor texts (or, as we call them at lilyPD, WAGOLLs — What a Good One Looks Likes).

Mentor texts are pieces of professional writing that guide and inspire other writers. This means they give us a vision for the thing we’re writing ourselves, and they teach us and give us tips for how to do it. Mentor texts let writers apprentice themselves to writers with more experience.

I’ve chosen two mentor texts in which a professional writer dives deep into writing about a place, and in very different ways. The first is from John Steinbeck (because I’m readying myself for the Netflix East of Eden miniseries in October!) and the other is from Annie Dillard, a Virginia writer who recently passed away.

Here’s the process I’d use with students to study these mentor writers before heading outside to write. You could study one or both if your students are ready for a bit of compare-and-contrast!

In this resource, you have a step-by-step how-to along with with mentor texts and annotated versions where I show my thinking.

If you’d like to get a little bit more instruction on using WAGOLLs/mentor texts with your students, Sam made a video for that!

Ready for More?

• Head to the Write Out Choice Board for additional place-based writing activities!
• Enroll in a lilyPD course where we use mentor texts / WAGOLLs in almost every course! In fact, our FREE course Exhibits in the Classroom features a whole video walking you and your students through studying a WAGOLL together!
• My colleague Allison Marchetti and I have written a few books on this topic if you’re ready to dive deep! Might I recommend A Teacher’s Guide to Mentor Texts as a great primer?

We’d love to know how you might use these mentor texts with your students or if there are OTHER mentor texts for place-based writing that you love! Share a comment to join our ongoing conversation and community!