For Wed. 11/20

This week we will begin class by discussing Dillard's "Total Eclipse" and continue with the first half of Maps to Anywhere. Please read and bring the texts and come prepared to discuss and share your ideas constructively.

Write your blog response on either of these readings, and otherwise follow the syllabus for assignments and due dates.



Essay Writing Assignment 1: follow the instructions below to choose a word,  create five parts/sections, and then turn this material into an essay of your own.

Writing A Creative Essay Exercise (from: http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Robert_Root/AWP/cnf.htm)

Kim Barnes: “What is a Word Worth?”

        I often speak to my writing students about "bringing their intellect to bear" as they compose their personal essays.  What I mean by this is that the best literary nonfiction should work at a number of different levels, including the level of intellectual stimulation.  The problem we face as writers of nonfiction is how to challenge our individual stories--how to take the narrative itself and expand its breadth and reach to encompass more of the world.

        One exercise that I use to help my students achieve this goal involves building an essay from a single word. First, the students each choose one word--any word--to which they are particularly drawn, a word that resonates for them.  A young man just discharged from the military chose "paratrooper"; a middle-aged woman of Scottish descent chose "bagpipes."  I then require that the students write five sections of nonfiction revolving around this single word: The first, third, and fifth sections must be personal memories triggered by the word, and they must be written in present tense no matter the actual chronology; the second and fourth sections must be more analytical, intellectual, philosophical, and explore the word in a more scholarly way.  I direct the students to study the word's derivation and history. They often find passages in religious texts and mythologies that inform the word's meaning in their own experience.  Some discuss the word's appearance and use in contemporary literature or film.

        The goal of this exercise is to weave the word's broader application into the writer's personal experience.  Ideally, the five sections weave together and inform one another and bring to the essay a kind of intellectual unity as well as a greater depth and complexity.

 

The Creative Essay

About Creative Nonfiction:

Alternatively known as "literary journalism" or the "literature of fact," creative nonfiction is that branch of writing which employs literary techniques and artistic vision usually associated with fiction or poetry to report on actual persons and events. Though only recently identified and taught as a distinct and separate literary genre, the roots of creative nonfiction run deeply into literary tradition and history. The genre, as currently defined, is broad enough to include nature and travel writing, the personal memoir and essay, as well as "new journalism," "gonzo journalism," and the "nonfiction novel."  (Bruce Hoffman, Univ. of Pittsburgh English Department Alumus)

*Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality, Gay Talese, with introduction by Barbara Lounsberry

*Contemporary creative nonfiction: the art of truth, Bill Roorbach

*The Next American Essay, Ed. John D’Agata


Also see pdf on Writing Creative Nonfiction on EMU Online and Essay Packets

Fiction assignments and next week

For next week follow syllabus for the reading assignments as we transition into the genre of the creative essay, and come prepared to share your fiction stories in workshop groups. Write your blog post on Essay Packet 1.

Additional fiction writing exercises:

4 qualities (in-class writing)

postcards

HW Fiction Writing Assignment: Dialogue

Listen to or listen in on some other folks’ conversation. Write down what they say or remember it to write down later. Record 10-20 lines of the dialogue of a real conversation.

Use this dialogue in a story. You can create the characters around the dialogue or include the dialogue (in a single piece or separate it throughout the story) in a larger story that you construct. The story should include the dialogue as well as other story elements.

Bathhouse Creative Writing Events

Check out the Bathhouse facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/BathHouseEvents

next week Bathhouse Readings

Upcoming: BATHHOUSE EVENTS 11/5 & 11/6

Join us on November 5th and 6th as BathHouse Events and the Creative Writing Department welcomes Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant!


Readings by Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant
Tuesday, Nov. 5th, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
EMU Student Center Auditorium

And:“Textual Orality: African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices” 
A Discussion with Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant
Wednesday, Nov. 6th 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
EMU Student Center Auditorium

 

Texual Orality: African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices
The aesthetic and formal roots of African diasporic cultural production are often determined in relation to oral tradition, from poetic expression and practical education, to transmission of cosmologies and the genealogical storytelling of village griots. Celebrating and analyzing solely the oral can come at the expense of the written word, from signs and pictographs of ancient Egypt or Haiti, to the ‘spirit writing’ of African American mediums and healers. In response to this enduring but insufficient binary thinking, Tisa Bryant and Douglas Kearney devised the concept Textual Orality. Textual Orality is a way of naming this site of generative tension within African diasporic literature. Using this concept as a critical frame, Bryant and Kearney will explore the ways in which both the (il)legible and aural, the stylized mark and the spoken word, experiments in writing and traditions in performance (or vice-versa), are distinct and interdependent features of their individual writing practices and pedagogies.

 

Tisa Bryant:

            Though she hails from Boston, received an MFA from Brown University, and lives in Los Angeles, Tisa Bryant grew into her writing within San Francisco’s vibrant literary/arts communities, serving in various capacities with ATA, CineLatino, Frameline, New Langton Arts, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Small Press Traffic, and Intersection for the Arts, among others. She is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature and visual art; co-editor/founder of the ongoing cross-referenced journal of narrative and storytelling, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of War Diaries, an anthology of black gay men’s desire and survival, nominated for a 2010 LAMBDA Literary Award. Bryant is currently on a reunion tour with the poets and writers of The Dark Room Collective, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their nationally-renown African diasporic arts exhibition and reading series and she teaches fiction and experimental writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.

Douglas Kearney:

           Poet/performer/librettist DouglasKearney’s second, full-length collection of poetry, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), was Catherine Wagner’s selection for the National Poetry Series. It was also a finalist for the Pen Center USA Award in 2010. His newest chapbook, SkinMag (A5/Deadly Chaps) is available. Red Hen Press will publish Kearney’s third collection, Patter, in 2014. He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award and fellowships at Idyllwild, Cave Canem, and others. Two of his operas, Sucktionand Crescent City, have received grants from the MAPFund. Sucktion has been produced internationally. Crescent Citypremiered in Los Angeles in 2012. He has been commissioned to write and/or teach ekphrastic poetry for the Weisman Museum (Minneapolis), Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCA, SFMOMA, the Getty and the Poetry Foundation. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts.

Assignments and Reminders

Please remember that CRTW201 is a College English Course and reading assignments are required. Please read carefully and constructively, and come prepared to participate in the discussion during class time. 


For next week follow the syllabus and read Juice by Renee Gladman. Come prepared to discuss the book in its entirety. Bring it with you.

Also, read the pdfs by Burroway, Lamott, and Goldberg and come prepared to discuss, share your ideas and insights.

Please remember to do a blog post every week on whatever the reading assignment is for that week. See syllabus for specific guidelines.




Writing exercises so far (fiction); you should be working on these; if you don't know what it is, ask someone in class:

imitation and continuation of short-short fiction story

description - microfiction

Writing Exercises

Poem Writing exercises so far:


3 poems from the 20 word list

2-3 sonnets in whatever style you like (you can write in the style and structure of Shakespeare or be as innovative (or more innovative) than Ted Berrigan

20 Poetry Projects (pdf on EMU Online)

Response, after, inspired by poem: choose a poem from City Eclogue and write a poem in response, as a continuation, or etc.