Creative Writing, Fall 2018

I can't pick a winner for the in-class writing exercise because they were all so good, and there were different reasons why they worked.  Here are just a few of the sentences that stood out (though ALL of you had good work): ****** "Dust motes drifted by as I watched him get ready to open the store. He was a kind old man, whith hands leathered by age. Yet each time, the rough, calloused hands picked me up, their touch was a soft as the cloth he used to polish the cabinet." ******* "When I was young, my grandmother had this set of Russian nesting dolls. Every day when I went to her house after shool, I had to play with them. In borken English, she would tell me to be gentle. 'I know!' I would yell, as I ripped the dolls apart. I grew older and stopped visiting her apartment. Soon, I began to forget them." ******* "I didn't know you that well but I would see you in the halls all the time. You were the popluar girl and I was the loner...

Your blog post for next week will be to find an image from your assigned artist (see below) and write a 500 to 750 story about what's happening in this image you've chosen. Include the image in your post. Pay attention to the title of the image that you've chosen, as it may help you shape the story. Victoria                         Sally Mann Megan                           Sophie Calle Danielle                         Faith Ringgold Nolan                            Jean-Michael Basquiat Devyn                           Diane Arbus JeffDaniel                     Kehinde Wiley Thania...

https://soundcloud.com/homecomingshow/1-m

I have embedded a video on embedding. You can view it below.

Your first actual assignment will be to write a poem and marry it with a related series of images that intensify the meaning of the poem. To start, write for 15 minutes: List: A favorite memory A story you like to tell people An event in your life when you were very sad. An event in your life when you were overjoyed. An event in your life when you were terrified. A time you had a conflict with someone you cared about. Something in your life you are proud of. An important journey or trip you took. An experience where you did something new for the first time. Read:  My Father Writes a Poem for my Mother By Anita Skeen When you write about your mother passing, he says to me from beside her bed where he has spent the night,  and I know you will, be sure to say last night it rained, that the rain she asked about each day played for her on the moonsoaked river and that, in the early hours, the birds lit up the sky with song and the bush out ...

Adobe Spark makes it easy to create and share videos that you can make in less than half an hour. This one took about that amount of time and the most complicated part was completing the search for the poem and the artist to go with it. They offer music selections and also allow you to add your own music if you'd like.  Pros: Free so far. No download required. Cons: Requires attribution. Slightly confusing to figure out how to download for sharing on YouTube. Here is the same idea produced via Giphy.com. This format is best for short gifs--not a lot of words. You can see that the full poem doesn't completely fit here. You also cannot manipulate the sizing of images or add music or narration.    via GIPHY Here is a basic GIF with one-word text. via GIPHY

It's almost over-whelming once you start looking for examples of multimedia. There are photo blogs, and video blogs, and interactive games, and online word poetry repositories. For the purposes of today's class discussion, I will provide a sampling, but there are many, many more out there. Story and pictures from  The New Yorker on first-time voters . And  music and video... Sam Frank's “Happy Russia”  from  https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues Kate Greenstreet’s “locating faraway objects” Ander Monson’s “For Orts” "  Jesse Darling's Tumblr:  Brave New What  

How do you go about introducing yourself to a group of strangers? If it was an addiction meeting, I would start with, "Hi, my name is Aimee, and I'm a (fill in the blank with an addiction)."' But it's not that type of intro. I can add here that I don't drink, though I used to drink and found that it made my already low-boundaries almost invisible. So, I stopped. I stopped also because I got tired of waking up embarrassed by something that I had said or done the night before while under the influence of two liters of bad white wine. I could start with my childhood, the basic facts. I was born to a single mother named Donna in a small rural town in Giltner, Nebraska. Mom on a car with her brothers. Mom before she had me.  They were working animals, the same way that the cows are not pets, but products. It took me a long time to reconcile that the cows I saw with the wet-pink noses and swishing tails in the pasture would the same things that ende...