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Welcome to The Teaching of Creative Writing |
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Welcome to E614, The Teaching of Creative Writing. I'll be using this space for news, updates, announcements, and comments regarding class assignments and discussion. Please note that I will be attending a conference during our first class January 30. Students will meet in Healey UL-42, Purple Lab, for instruction on how to use this website. 5/14: Looks like we all forgot about class evaluations--better to do them the night we have food! Kelly Ritter e-mail me the following, so please prepare questions and comments: "I'm going to prepare a discussion about how 5/7: Class evaluations tonight. See Edward Hirsch on the relationship between walking and poetry at <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/17/AR2008041703573.html> 4/30: We are NOT meeting as a class 5/21. You may e-mail me your final portfolio of two completed exercises and two process papers. Reading for 4/30--please refer to the footnote on pg. 52 of Can It Really Be Taught? If you'd like me to look over drafts of pedagogy papers due May 7, please give them to me by May 2. Those who have posted pedagogy papers and wish to refine or revise them may repost by May 7 with heading FINAL pedagogy 1, 2, or 3. 4/23: Looking for a reading? Scroll to the bottom of this page for a list of poetry events through May 18. For tonight's class, please read Brisja Sternquist's pedagogy paper #1, and Joleen Westerdale's pedagogy papers #1 and #2. 4/16: More of your pedagogy papers are posted on line; take a look! Those who have used portfolio methods and/or contract grading in the classroom might consider writing your short theory paper in response to Wendy Bishop's article. 4/9: More from the April 7 NEW YORKER on good dialogue: <http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/04/07/080407crbo_books_wood> For a definiton and examples of double dactyls, see <http://nielsenhayden.com/dactyls.html> From Donald Hall's interview, "Flying Revision's Flag": What do you want to accomplish when you revise? Obviously, you hope to improve the poem, to discover its ideal shape or expression. Would you describe specific goals? I guess I can't describe goals other than the ones you mention. I'm not discovering "its ideal shape" exactly. I used to think that the statue was there inside the stone and I needed only carve down to it. Now I understand that new things come into the poem during revision, for instance things that have happened after I started the poem. Maybe I begin the poem mentioning "death" and then somebody in particular dies; the poem is apparently "about" something that happened after the poem began. Poems are ongoing improvisations toward goals we identify when we arrive at them. 4/2--For next week's assignment, see "Assignments." Note the revised url for Donald Hall's essay on the syllabus--I'm not sure where the original came from! Two pedagogy papers have been posted by Jeremy L. Please contact me if you have questions about the form or content of your own. 3/26: For next week, bring a list of ten two-syllable and ten three-syllable words, accented as you'll find them in the dictionary. We'll use them to create some nonsense poems in a variety of meters. From the March 24, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, see Jill Lepore on truth and lies in history and fiction, pg. 79-83 or <http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/03/24/080324crat_atlarge_lepore > Change in syllabus--to accomodate Kelly Ritter's visit to our last class May 14, we'll discuss the ecology of the creative writing classroom 4/30 and evaluating creative writing 5/7. 3/5: As we approach the mid semester break, consider planning a time line for completing your assignments. To avoid doing most of your written work in May, write your review now, or as soon as you attend a reading. The even't doesn't have to be on campus, although you're all encouraged to join the Bishop celebration March 10 at 4:00 pm in rm 47. For class: How would you use the images in your piece of exemplary writing to teach students about the nature and quality of imagery in their own work? For discussion: Annie Dillard, Nadine Gordimer, Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa. For more details on assignments due May 14, including pedagogy papers, click on Assignments. From James Wood’s review of two novels in The New Yorker, 3/3/08, p 79-83. Whether we agree or disagree with the magazine's idea of good writing, Wood makes his standards clear: Carey’s…novel…has the bruising tang of all his fiction…the world bulges out of his sentences. A man is described as “not hurrying, but prancy in bare feet.” A boy feels “squiffy in the stomach.” A beat-up car has a “busted sunken boneless back seat.” An Upper East Side society matron brings [home] her “powdery friends from the English-Speaking Union.” An Australian shack has a veranda “where bats hung like broken rags.” vs. The prose seems unwilling to bestir itself. Here Kunzu describes a march on the American Embassy…: “Up close, coming toward you, police horses are bigger than you could imagine. Facing the metal-shod hoofs, the jangling harnesses, wild eyes, and flaring nostrils, you know how it must have felt to be a serf in a medieval battle….the horses charged into us, kicking up clods of turf, their riders standing up in the stirrups to add force to their baton blows…People were thrashing about on the ground. I saw a girl trapped beneath a horse, desperately trying to cover her head with her hands. The horse reared up, almost unseating its rider, a red-faced sergeant with a toothbrush mustache.” This is not really vivid enough, and the medieval aspects of horses is a too familiar picture.
2/27: Here's the Dickinson poem from the Thomas Johnson edition. Earlier, edited versions of her poem still appear in books and on the web, so be aware of the differences. 254 "Hope" is the thing with feathers— And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard— I've heard it in the chillest land—
2/20--URL for WPE rubrics:<http://www.umb.edu/academics/undergraduate/office/wpr/elements.html> Is it possible or desirable to create rubrics for creative writing? From Poetry Daily <www.poems.com>:
"I guess I am suggesting here the role of not-knowing that plays itself out in the writing of poetry. That this not-knowing plays a signal role in the production of reality in a poem. I like the word bewilderment because it has both be and wild in it, and I can imagine also wilderness inside it as well. As to certainty or authority in my work, I prefer the word inevitability—that is to say, meaning in a poem can be at once random and inevitable, and not-knowing can come to some sort of order that allows meaning to happen, mystery. A simpler way to say this is that I write to discover what I might know only in the act of making the poem itself."--interview with Peter Gizzi. Notes on good writing: here are qualities of good writing you described in class discussion and in your papers: --leaves out as much as it leaves in. --is complex, suggesting many meanings with one word. --allows us to live with ambiguity. --creates an invisible story that parallels the visible one. --creates a continuous dream. --is fluid and encompasses opposites. --reveals something new each time you read it. --is not a description of experience but an experience in itself. --generates multiple interpretations not understood on first reading. --communicates and engages the reader. --engages the reader in an active process. --creates intriguing characters and situations readers can empathize with. --makes flawed characters likeable. --provides twists and turns that make a reader want to know how a story resolves itself. --moves the reader. --surprises the reader. --changes the language. --contains satisfying formal elements. --has integrity. --provides unexpected truth. --surprises and confounds readers’ expectations. --instructs and delights.
--reveals a piece of the universe. --reveals the overlooked. --expresses the universal through the particular. -- uses beautiful lies to create a greater truth. --is appealing and entertaining. --produces excitement in the reader. --makes the reader feel understood.
2/13--Short pap/r (discussion of what makes your selection an exemplary piece of literature) due. For class, be prepared to discuss examples of good writing posted or handed out by Joleen, Jeremy B., Brisja, Jason, John, Lily, Karen, Lisa and Deb. On 2/20 we'll discuss work posted or handed out by Janet. Chrsitina, Jeremy L, Abby, Patrick, Jeffrey, Dan, and Kris. In light of our consideration of "why write?" we'll begin by discussing the goals of students and teachers in the creative writing classroom. What different goals are suggested by "Educating the Imagination," the John Gardner interview, "The Sudden Adoption of Creative Work," and "Putting Wings on the Invisible"? Are students' goals sometimes in conflict with instructors' goals? 1/30--The bookstore has ordered and we will be using the second edition of Janet Burroway's Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. The chapter headings are the same as in the first edition and so are many of the readings, though the page numbers differ slightly. Please let me know if you already have the first edition of the text. To post materal to this website: Go to Writing Room and log in. Your username is your e-mail address up to the @ symbol. Your password is the last 4 digits of your student number. If you've used Contribute before in another class, you'll have to use a different username and/or password for this one; Janet Stevens will make the change. To find class posts, go to Class Portfolio. To find posts by an individual student, go to Student Profiles.
Boston Area Readings through May 18 Friday, May 2, 7:00 pm Breakwater Reading Series Poets Alex Gang, George Kovach and Ron Spalletta Fiction writer Jason Wiener Porter Square Books Porter Sq. Cambridge Friday, May 2, 8:00 pm Monday May 3, 7:30 pm Sunday, May 4, 2 pm Sunday, May 4, 2 pm Monday, May 5, 8 pm Thursday, May 8, 4:30 - 6:00 pm Saturday, May 10, 6 pm Saturday, May 17, 3:30 Saturday, May 17, 8 pm Sunday, May 18, 3 pm
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