Week 14 Assignments

Writing Assignment

Everyone does this:
Final Portfolio Due December 10, 2009! Remember to bring an SASE if you'd like me to mail you your portfolio over the break.
Optional:
You may turn in ONE make-up writing exercise on the last day of class next week. I will not accept make-up assignments by mail, email, or after next class!


Blog (Optional)
1. If you like, post work that you would like the class to read and respond to.

2. Post comments on at least three other entries. Identify something from the piece that strikes or interests you, ask a neutral question about the work, or suggest ways the author could deepen or expand it.


Bring Food and Drink
If you can, bring something to share at our final class reading and party!

Week 13 Assignments

Writing Assignment
Choose One
1) Find a piece of writing that you find difficult, frustrating, or confusing, and write your own creative response, copying as many elements as you can (form, style, tone, rhythm, development, themes, etc.)

2) Compose an ars poetica in any genre (look back at "Paradoxes and Oxymorons," "Ars Poetica" and "Personism" in the course reader for a few examples)

Read for December 3
Not Knowing, Donald Barthelme
Against Epiphanies, Charles Baxter

Blog
1. This week, post a challenge you have with revision, or post a revision method that works well for you, or both!

2. Post comments on at least three other entries. Remember, this is not a place for critiquing each other’s work. Instead, identify something from the piece that strikes or interests you, ask a neutral question about the work, or suggest ways the author could deepen or expand it.

Week 12 Assignments

Workshop Preparation
Respond to the scene or one-act play from your workshop group by completing a Peer Response Form (handed out in class and posted to the blog) for each piece. Forms should be typed. Bring two copies of each response to class November 19th, one for the writer, and one for me.

Writing Assignment
Optional (if you still need to turn in a poem or prose piece, here are some exercises to work from):
1) Compose a series of at least five found poems or found prose pieces that have a shared theme, subject, or organizational principal.
2) Compose your own cento of at least 40 lines using at least 5 different texts.

Read for Next Week
Paradoxes and Oxymorons, John Ashbery
Blow-Up, Julio Cortazar
The Liar, Tobias Wolff

Blog
1. Post a link to an online literary magazine you like. Give us a brief one-paragraph write up of the site’s focus, interests, and aesthetic. If the magazine features collaborative or interactive processes, so much the better!

Week 11 Assignments

Workshop Preparation
Respond to the poetry from your workshop group by completing a Peer Response Form (handed out in class and posted to the blog) for each piece. Forms should be typed. Bring two copies of each response to class November 12th, one for the writer, and one for me.

Writing Assignments
Bring a finished scene or one-act play for workshop next week.

Optional (if you still need to turn in a poem, here are some exercises to work from):
1) Write a poem in any of the traditional forms. Feel free to stick close to the form or to stray from it as Berrigan does.
2) Write a poem in a form that you invent as John Cage did in Method.
3) Continue your LOV(E) piece from class. The finished work should be half a page to a page long.

Read for Next Week
• The Dong with the Luminous Nose, John Ashbery from Wakefulness (passed out in class and posted to the blog)
• The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld, Hart Seely from Slate Magazine online at http://slate.msn.com/id/2081042
• Epistolary Project, Various Authors from Sidebrow Magazine online at www.sidebrow.net/2006/epistolary.php
• Ghost Project, Various Authors from Sidebrow Magazine online at www.sidebrow.net/2006/ghost.php

Blog
Write a short piece in any genre in response to either Epistolary Project or Ghost Project and post it to the blog.

Week 10 Assignments

Workshop Preparation
Respond to the fiction from your workshop group by completing a Peer Response Form (handed out in class and posted to the blog) for each piece. Forms should be typed. Bring two copies of each response to class November 5th, one for the writer, and one for me.

Writing Assignment
Bring in a piece of poetry for workshop the following week. You will need to bring 6 copies of your work, one for each person in your workshop group and one for me.

Read for Next Week
from Composition in Retrospect, John Cage
Present Tense, Harryette Mullen from Sleeping with the Dictionary
Sonnet 2 and Sonnet 18, Ted Berrigan
New Years Resolution, Lydia Davis
Sonnet 14, John Berryman

Blog
1. Post an entry about any one of the readings this week. This may be a critical or creative piece of about 200-300 words. It MUST respond to your chosen reading in some way, either by identifying and discussing craft elements, themes, or techniques or by using those elements in a creative response.

2. Post comments on at least three other entries. Remember, this is not a place for critiquing each other’s work. Instead, identify something from the piece that strikes or interests you, ask a neutral question about the work, or suggest ways the author could deepen or expand it.

Important - Class Canceled Tomorrow, October 22!!

Unfortunately I have to cancel class tomorrow, Thursday, October 22. I came down with a nasty flu in Chicago and currently have a very high temperature. I'm sorry for any inconvenience, and I look forward to seeing you next week.

For homework:
For next week, please remember to bring in a piece of fiction for workshop the following week. You will need to bring 6 copies of your work, one for each person in your workshop group and one for me. You are not required to post to the blog next week (but please post as usual this week).

As always, please feel free to email me if you have any questions, though I may be a bit slower to respond in the next couple of days.

Week 8 Assignments

Note: If you did not turn in a mid-term portfolio, you may email it or place it in my box in the Creative Writing Office (Hum 380).

Writing Assignment

Choose One:
1) "Everything in life dreams. A bicycle dreams of becoming a boy, an umbrella dreams of becoming the rain, a pearl dreams of becoming a woman, and a chair dreams of becoming a gazelle and running back to the forest." ~ Marela, Scene 3 (from Anna in the Tropics)

Write about an object that dreams of becoming something else -- something more important, more alive, more animated with spirit.

2) Take your family story from last week. This time, expand and exaggerate the story, adding fantastical and elements that nevertheless make emotional sense within the story. Take risks, make the story so different that only a seed is still recognizable. This can be in the form of a story or a one-act play.

3) Write your own opening to a play that allows space for the fantastic or mythological to enter. Describe the setting, characters, and costumes in about one page.


Read for Next Week
Gentleman’s Agreement, Mark Richard
Axolotl, by Julio Cortázar
Push Hands: Balancing resistance and revision, Jeffrey Skinner
On Defamiliarization, Charles Baxter


Blog
1. Post an entry about any one of the readings this week. This may be a critical or creative piece of about 200-300 words. It MUST respond to your chosen reading in some way, either by identifying and discussing craft elements, themes, or techniques or by using those elements in a creative response.

2. Post comments on at least three other entries. Remember, this is not a place for critiquing each other’s work. Instead, identify something from the piece that strikes or interests you, ask a neutral question about the work, or suggest ways the author could deepen or expand it.

Week 7 Assignments

Writing Assignment

Choose One:
1) Imagine a moment where a character is speechless or at a loss for words. Write a scene of at least one page that expresses that moment.

2) Take the writing exercise from class and continue from there. What other experience, conclusion or idea does the story lead you to? Or maybe an experience or image leads to a memory. Make sure the relationship between the two isn’t too explicit. Take leaps! This could take the form or a story, poem, or one-act play.

3) Write a monologue that weaves together an artistic experience and larger historical or personal context, as Spalding Gray did in Swimming to Cambodia. You might respond to a painting or play you viewed, or something you wrote or performed in yourself. Try to explore the deeper and broader resonances of your experience.


Read for Next Week
Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz

IN THE COURSE READER
Lightness, Italo Calvino from Six Memos for the Next Millennium
The Bucket Rider, Franz Kafka
The Colonel, Carolyn Forche


Blog
1. Post an entry about any one of the readings this week. This may be a critical or creative piece of about 200-300 words. This may be a critical or creative piece of about 200-300 words and must follow the blog response guidelines. It MUST respond to your chosen reading in some way, either by identifying and discussing craft elements, themes, or techniques or by using those elements in a creative response.

2. Post comments on at least three other entries. Remember, this is not a place for critiquing each other’s work. Instead, identify something from the piece that strikes or interests you, ask a neutral question about the work, or suggest ways the author could deepen or expand it.

Week 6 Assignments

Writing Assignment

Choose One:
1) Write a conversation between two liars. Give everything they say a double or triple meaning. Never state or indicate through outside description that these two people are lying. Let the reader figure it out strictly from the dialog. Try not to be obvious, such as having one person accuse the other of lying.

2) Write two poems or monologues in which two characters see the same situation from very different points of view. Let the characters speak. Experiment with voice, tone, and characterization. Format the two so that they go on simultaneously as in Double Trouble.

3) This week, listen in on the conversations you hear around you – on the bus, in a café, between your housemates. At some point during the week, settle someplace where there is lot’s of conversation going on. Eavesdrop on those around you and transcribe as much as possible of what you hear. Write a story, poem, or scene using the dialogue you “collected.”


Read for Next Week
“A pause, a rose, something on paper,” and “As for we who “love to be astonished,”” Lyn Hejinian
Pet Milk, Stuart Dybek
Our Lady of 121st Street, Stephen Adly Guirgis (!!)


Blog
1. Post an entry about any one of the readings this week. This may be a critical or creative piece of about 200-300 words and must follow the blog response guidelines. It MUST respond to your chosen reading in some way, either by identifying and discussing craft elements, themes, or techniques or by using those elements in a creative response.

2. Post comments on at least three other entries. Remember, this is not a place for critiquing each other’s work. Instead, identify something from the piece that strikes or interests you, ask a neutral question about the work, or suggest ways the author could deepen or expand it.

Week 5 Assignments

Paper #1
Due Thursday, October 1, 2009

Writing Exercise
Take an exercise you’ve written this semester that you’re not entirely happy with, or take something that you really like that you think could be explored more deeply. Change the voice, from first person to second or third person or from third person to first or second person. Then continue to revise the piece, making any other revisions the changes suggest. Make sure to include the original version along with your new piece.

Read for Next Week
Our Lady of 121st Street, Stephen Adly Guirgis

Blog
No blog posts this week – work on your paper!

Paper #1

PAPER #1
Due October 1, 2009

GENERAL GUIDELINES
Select a poem or short story from our course reader, or a speech/monologue from either of the assigned plays. In a paper of approximately 1,000 words, respond to your chosen text using one of the options listed below. Although you may choose any creative piece from the reader, keep in mind that it should be something that you can respond to meaningfully, in the space of roughly 3-4 pages. Something very long or very short may be more difficult.

Papers must by typed and double spaced, and written in 12-point font (Times New Roman preferred) with one-inch margins. Attach a copy of the poem, story, or speech/monologue you are responding to. If you refer to outside sources, make sure to cite them using standard MLA style and include a works cited page. Here is a useful link for those who need a refresher: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/

RESPONSE TOPICS
Option 1 ~ Analyze a short story in terms of how it is constructed, paying close attention to plot structure, patterns, and momentum. For example: In what ways does the author set the scene? At what point and how is the central conflict introduced? What kinds of patterns or escalations does the author use to create a feeling of rising tension? How are the reader’s expectations thwarted or confirmed? What effects do structure and development have on the feeling, atmosphere, or tone of the story? How do the formal or structural elements of the story relate to the themes or ideas explored? What do the author’s techniques suggest to you for your own writing?

Option 2 ~ Scan a poem, monologue, or speech using the scansion techniques discussed in class. Analyze the piece word by word and line by line, identifying metrical pattern, line length, and variations. How does the writer use meter to control pace? How does the writer end each line, each stanza, the work itself? How does (s)he begin each line? What effect does the choice of metrical patterns have on the tone, feeling, or atmosphere of the poem or speech? How does meter support or counter the images and themes of the piece? What other techniques does the writer use to supplement the meter (rhyme, images, or themes)? What do the author’s techniques suggest to you for your own writing?

Option 3 ~ As Stephen Ratcliffe states in “MEMO / RE: Reading Stein,” Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons explores “the shape of sound in writing—how sound shapes and creates the meaning of a text in ways that go beyond the meaning of its words. Playing with language—grammar, syntax, sound, rhythm, word meaning—in order to ‘rewrite’ it, free it from its denotative and connotative responsibilities, she discovered the materiality of words as objects, things, physical and acoustic matter whose referential meaning—carafe, teacup, tumbler, feather—while still actively present, was not their only interest. . . . She began to see words not simply as a window opening on the world, signaling that world, inviting the reader to pass through them into it; rather, words happen here—on the page, in air—their particular atomic weights and textures, spin and counterspin, enacted first by the writer who composes a text, reenacted by the reader who reads it.”

Select and analyze in detail one piece from “Objects,” exploring the ways in which Stein uses grammar, syntax, sound, rhythm, rhyme and word meaning. Discuss the effect Stein’s choices have on your experience of reading the piece and think about how her work influences your thinking about the words you use when writing. Finally, draft a poem of no more than a page, chosen from the options below, and include it with your paper. The poem should not be part of the word count.

1. Write a poem in which the canvas of the poem is flattened, where the value or meaning is distributed across the entirety of the work, where each compositional element is of equal importance.
2. When subject matter is commonplace or ugly, as is often the case in “realism,” method itself is foregrounded. Write a poem about a mundane object or event, where the main interest lies in how it is rendered. The written “brushstrokes” may even render the original subject unrecognizable.

Week 4 Assignments

Writing Assignment

Choose One:
1) Go over your free-write from class and underline anything in iambic pentameter (we may or may not have gotten to this in class). Using the sections you underlined, write a poem or monologue in iambic pentameter. Feel free to cheat on the meter, as Shakespeare does. And don’t be afraid to write or revise as much as needed. Your free-write is just a starting point!

2) Write a poem or monologue of no more than a page in which the rhythm and sounds support the content in some way, as in The Dance and My Papa’s Waltz. Allow the language to support (or contradict!) what happens on the page.


Read for Next Week

IN THE COURSE READER
In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried, Amy Hempel
The Rain and The Language, Robert Creeley
The Day Lady Died, Frank O’Hara
Fork, Charles Simic
The Difference Between Pepsi and Coke, David Lehman
Musee des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden


Blog

1. Post an entry about any one of the readings this week. This may be a critical or creative piece of about 200-300 words and must follow the blog response guidelines. It MUST respond to your chosen reading in some way, either by identifying and discussing craft elements, themes, or techniques or by using those elements in a creative response.

2. Post comments on at least three other entries. Remember, this is not a place for critiquing each other’s work. Instead, identify something from the piece that strikes or interests you, ask a neutral question about the work, or suggest ways the author could deepen or expand it.

Week 3 Assignments

Writing Assignment: You will do two writing exercises this week

Everyone does this:
Write your “chapter” of the collaborative story. Take the one line story you copied from the board in class this week. This will be the “seed” for a story of one paragraph (no more than 300 words). Craft a story around your line, making sure you have conflict, rising action, a crisis, and a resolution. Your “seed” line must appear somewhere in the story. Make and bring enough copies for everyone. Do not put your name on your story, but label it with the group name (Exposition, Crisis, etc.)

AND

Choose one:
1) Finish the repetition poem you started in class today (or write a new one). Really try to push the poem in as many directions as possible, relying on the repeated phrase to ground the poem. Try out the skills we’ve talked about in class, especially the different kinds of patterns.
CORRECTION: We didn't get to this in class today, however you can create a poem using any of the forms of patterning we talked about in class, including assonance, consonants, alliteration, rhyme, repetition, etc.

2) Write a poem, story, or monologue that follows the logic of language as in "A Mown Lawn," by Lydia Davis. Allow assonance, consonance, alliteration, and rhyme to lead the development of the piece and create the forward momentum. Surprise the reader and yourself with linguistic playfulness.

Reading for Next Week

IN READING LIKE A WRITER:
Words, pp. 13-33

IN THE COURSE READER:
Rhyming Action, Charles Baxter
Objects, Gertrude Stein, from Tender Buttons
My Papa’s Waltz, Theodore Roethke
The Dance, William Carlos Williams

Blog
1. Post an entry about any one of the readings this week. This may be a critical or creative piece of about 200-300 words. It MUST respond to your chosen reading in some way, either by identifying and discussing craft elements, themes, or techniques or by using those elements in a creative response.

2. Post comments on at least three other entries. Remember, this is not a place for critiquing each other’s work. Instead, identify something from the piece that strikes or interests you, ask a neutral question about the work, or suggest ways the author could deepen or expand it.

Week 1 Writing Assignment

I'm sorry that some people didn't get the email with the assignments last week. For those of you who did not receive the email, I will accept Week One writing assignment this week and next week. I will also offer an extra credit assignment toward the end of the semester.

Writing Assignment

Choose One:
1) This week, make a habit of noticing everything around you.  Choose two or three concrete, specific, images or details that seem particularly telling about a character or a situation.  Using those images, write a poem of no longer than ten lines, or a story of no more than one paragraph.  Remember – be brief.  Let your images do the work! 

2) Take an abstract word used to describe someone, (for example, ugly, stupid, pretty, funny, kind, crazy, heroic etc.).  Writing no more than a page, use concrete images and details to convey the quality you choose, without ever using that word.  For instance, if you choose ugly, make the reader know that your character is ugly without ever sayings so.

Week 2 Assignments

Writing Assignment: You will do two writing exercises this week

Everyone does this:
Write three one-line stories or poems using a strong image as a metaphor that encapsulates a moment or situation, just as we did in class. Try to tell the whole story with a single metaphor.

AND

Choose One:
1) Construct a story or poem of no more than 2 pages in which you introduce a pattern that creates the rising action of the piece. Then find an unexpected way to resolve the situation (as in The School).

2) Write a story in which a main character is defined by a particular fear or obsession. Let
that obsession lead to the story’s crisis.

3) Two characters meet. The first wants a book back from the second, but the second doesn’t want to give it. What are the specific desires of each character? What is the conflict for each of them? Write the scene in fiction or play form (don’t worry about manuscript format for now).

Reading for Next Week

IN READING LIKE A WRITER:
Details, pp. 193-207
Close Reading (optional) pp. 1-12

HANDOUTS
“Everything that Rises Must Converge,” Flannery O’Connor

IN THE COURSE READER:
My Name, Richard Brautigan from In Watermelon Sugar
Margaret, Richard Brautigan from In Watermelon Sugar
A Mown Lawn, Lydia Davis

Blog
1. Post an entry about any one of the readings this week. This may be a critical or creative piece of about 100-300 words. It MUST dialogue with your chosen reading in some way, either by identifying and discussing craft elements, themes, or techniques or by using those elements in a creative response.

2. Post comments on at least three other entries. Remember, this is not a place for critiquing each other’s work. Instead, identify something from the piece that strikes or interests you, ask a neutral question about the work, or suggest ways the author could deepen or expand it.