WEEK 7: BRAIDING

Read: Kathy Acker p.779-794

NOW: Use the short sentences (#3 from last week) as the bones of this week's piece. Add flesh and muscle from the other two paragraphs. The idea is to write material and then to experiment with the ordering of the material. You need not use everything you wrote last week... or--feel free to add even more. Do a couple versions if you like...

Alternately, you can also use this exercise to generate more material for one of the pieces you have already done--to flesh it out and start building a final version for your portfolio.  For example... the first paragraph can be replaced with a more meditative/musing paragraph on any "larger implications" of a scene you are writing... you do not have to be writing about a large issue/event to use this "braid-form." Not at all. 

GOAL: To free ourselves from the tyranny of "how things come out onto the page" - Re-ordering/ fleshing out/accordian-ing thought: these can be your best friend if you let them... they certainly provide you with a ton of possibilities.

WEEK 6: MAKE THE STRANDS

WREAD: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter

Assignment (this will be in 2 parts... this week and next--for this week please compose the following

1. Write a chunky paragraph telling what the "big" event is (its nature). This is mostly expository background -- on a world event (presidential election, natural disaster, NASA discovery)... a media event (news story that caught your attention, celebrity death, etc)... or on a more localized "big deal" (your brother's wedding, a graduation, a concert or protest march). All that needs to happen here is that the event be beyond your sphere... affecting others in a profound way.  Write this paragraph in the 3rd person. (No mention of self.) Use the internet to do research on larger implications and to get facts right.

2. Write a paragraph of long sentence description of a setting--the place you were when you became aware of this event (or if you were somehow involved in the event). Describe the physicality of the scene. Do not mention yourself much, if at all. Put in as much sensory info as you can--all 5 senses if possible.

3. Write a 6-word-or-less sentence spine... a play by play of your actions when you heard about the event  - or a play-by-play your actions during a particularly compelling moment (if you were in the event). Even dialogue must be compressed to 6-word or less bursts.

Portfolio Thinking

ELEMENTS

1. What I hope/What I fear/What I am still learning about writing and/or my humanity (same thing really) – reflective intro / DO THIS LAST... a final short personal essay (see BELOW).

2. (W)reading response to a piece that inspired [or repelled you instructively] this term. How does it do what it does?

3.  ALL your glosses - that you wrote/not that you received (gathered from the discussion board)

4. mimimum 2500 words of nonfiction – any form – no maximum (your *best* work followed by your *best* revisioning.)

HARDCOPIES due Friday March 17^th in my mailbox (5^th floor MacAlister)

________________________________________________________________________

A. Organize/Design your portfolio in a way that is meaningful to you (Create a Table of Contents if you like). Think of this as an object whose presentation is ALSO a form.

B. Read through your work (yes! again) and think about the various processes you went through this semester. 

C. Write a FINAL PERSONAL ESSAY about yourself and your work (500-750). You may choose to write this in any style/form you see fit (use in class writings/true-lies/lists/GIF metaphors/letters if you like)—first or third person... formal, informal… etc.   

D. ASK yourself what you learned about your self as a writer and as a human being this term. Feel free to address these issues (options, always options):

•             The (w)reading (professional and craft-oriented and your peers’)
•             The (w)riting (see how I did that?) It *IS* ritualistic, I swear.
•             The critiquing (as peer-partner and as line-editor/as a critiquer and as a critiquee)
•             The resistance and the revision

*Maybe don't use easy phrases such as “I’ve learned a lot about....” and “I have improved as a writer because...”  Instead, point me to the places of interest in your writing, your FAVORITE places. Talk to them, not about them.

Take responsibility for the work you did this semester. Offer compliments to peers whose work was particularly valuable to your process (! please please please !), and ask yourself what you might have done to suck more marrow from the bones of this class and the world. Candid, constructive, and generous critique is what I am looking for. No blowing of the smoke. 

Best of luck, swimmers.

WEEK 5: Tell a story that is not your story. Essay of Witness.

Tell a story that is not your own. You can use this assignment to explore the "eavesdropping/observation" action that I had you do last week. You can try to tell the story of a situation you observed from the outside (you cannot take the voice/be inside the head of another human although of course you can speculate on what they might be thinking and feeling).

You are also welcome to do research on a current event story or interview someone and present their story to the world. You can play a role in this essay (you can be present and even write in the first - or third - person). However, the story you tell should be someone else's.

Again, as always, figure out what this means to you. I'm encouraging you all to try to do more research than you have as of yet. You'd be surprised what is sparked *inside* you when you look outside a little further than you are used to.

Readings: Charles Reznikoff's from Testimony (p361-412). Make sure you read the intro to this so you understand Reznikoff's project - this gets repetitive and is technically a poem but also should get your mind reeling about the many ways to approach this assignment.

John T. Price's "The Burnt Plane" http://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/the-burnt-plane/ - the author is a character, but the story is not his.

And Beth Ann Fennelly's "Salvage" http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/salvage/ Almost a portrait.



One thing it will require--a sense of grave responsibility to your subject--whether s/he or they are strangers or friends.

WEEK 4: Meditative/Contemplative/Obsessive Essay

Writer/teacher Dave Hood defines the contemplative essay this way:

For many, a meditative essay explores an idea or topic. Typically, the writer asks an open-ended question—and then attempts to answer it in the  body of the essay. There is no definite answer to the question. Instead, the writer thinks out loud, pondering the question, writing down possible answers.  

For others, a meditative essay requires that the writer examine an object or emotion, seeking understanding through similes, metaphors, associations. The intent of the writer is to turn the abstract idea or the generalization of an emotion into an essay of concrete details that readers will understand and relate to. 

The meditative essay is not a narrative, and so there is no true or fictional story shared with the reader. Nor does the meditation focus on the self. And so it is not a personal narrative essay, which is based on a personal experience that results in an epiphany, and a universal truth. Instead the writer focuses outward on some idea, emotion, object—exploring possible answers. But there is no single, definitive answer.

I highlit the parts of this form I would like you to focus on this week. To fully invest in this meditation, you will need to do some research on whatever your topic ends up being. Research is broadly defined here--and can come straight from your laptop (but please keep track - in some form - of every place - virtual or otherwise - from which you gather info) or from more experiential or material sources (books, media, observation out in the world, interviews, etc.). This essay *should not* read as a story or a narrative (a collection of chronologically-and-character-linked events that are bound by a single event or concern). Instead, it is an exploration of a thing or idea that urges *your own personal and possibly obsessive* yet more open-ended investigation. You cannot escape yourself, but do not focus on your own experience as raw material here... instead your reader should encounter you in the way you gather and organize and link information. You-as-curator of accumulated/ing knowledge rather than you-as-subject.

Readings:

Melville on White (pp197-208)

John Cage on Silence (pp481-500)

Geoffrey Dyer On Photographs of Scarecrows: http://nyti.ms/2jxFyHQ

David Foster Wallace on the Lobster http://bit.ly/2kBV07x (super long but a CLASSIC and worth it to see how a remarkable mind can manifest in attention to things outside the self).

WEEK 3: The Singular Moment

What makes a moment worth capturing? And then, how do we try to capture it? This is this week's concern. Choosing the singular moment/object/event is an essential consideration... and after that choice... that is where the real work begins.

Do we tell the importance of the moment by delivering it in full story mode? As EB White offers a trip with his son (p. 473-80)? 

Do we use internal monologue/imagined conversation to show how a moment works inside the mind as in Laura Riding Jackson (p 357-360)?

Will you describe your encounter with an object and let the object speak through you? As WC Williams-- (p 231-36)?

A play by play--chronological with dialogue and description and a single paragraph of existential horror embedded somewhere in the middle? As in Orwell-- http://www.george-orwell.org/A_Hanging/0.html

Do we write a philosophical meditation on a common occurrence to elevate and magnify the mundane into beauty? As in Woolf-- https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter1.html

Or as Murakami does-- http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227213/on-seeing-the-100-perfect-girl-one-beautiful

Whatever you choose to do-- consider using sensory detail and note (to yourself... take note... be aware of) where/how/how long you choose to spend time *with* the external moment and when you deviate through *speculation* and *meditation* or *association* to other times and places.

WEEK 2: Letters

The letter is one of the oldest forms of nonfiction rumination... it can be intensely private, filled with personal references that make the reader feel as if one is overhearing an intimate conversation replete with codewords and shorthand. Letters like this are mysterious and poetic and obscure as much as they reveal. Other letters feel like "open letters" --meant to be consumed by a larger audience than their single addressee (or kept for posterity... enlarging their audience through repeated readings... one person becoming several through different ages).

What letters share is that they are focused into their shape by consideration of the needs of their receiver. What does my son/daughter need to know about the world? How can I show my friend that my love for them goes deeper than they imagine?

If you haven't read it yet, Anne Bradstreet's letter to her son Simon--in its aphoristic delivery--is a type of sifting through life experience to find useful tenets that will serve him. The jump from subject to subject is telling of her selection-- (What can a *mother* give a son in the 17th century as advice?... what spheres do they share?... knowledge of people and how they work, mostly)

p. 9-14 in your book

Ta-Nehisi Coates's Letter to His Son (excerpted here is a *long* section from the book of the same name... give yourself the time to read the entirety of it... it is both painful and stunning) is focused by his distillation of personal and national history into a revelation for his child. The last sentence brought me to tears when I first read it. This excerpt is long for this class... but important.  Search for the through-line, the returned-to refrain. The body.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/

Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (1903-8... translated from the German...read the first... but then as many as you wish for your own comfort) is an answer to a stranger's (an aspiring writer's) request for mentorship. Also advice, but delivered conversationally, with the intention of bolstering the artistic will.

http://www.carrothers.com/rilke_main.htm

Emily Dickinson's Master Letters (mid-1800s) are a different beast altogether... passionate and poetic outpourings of emotion to a friend or would-be lover or to God (a literary mystery even today)... they speak volumes about her (she refers to herself sometimes as Daisy in them)... the recipient's characteristics are less clear--but her emotional ferocity is palpable.

p. 221-24

Finally--this open letter shows the epistle-form's capacity for humor. (I will always try to show a form's ability to perform several functions). McSweeney's publishes open letters to odd entities... if you like, nose around on the site.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-my-ability-to-lose-interest-in-things-easily

Your assignment-- Write a letter about something you care deeply about. I suggest you address the letter to someone/something larger than the present moment (a future or past self... a descendant years from now... a relative or friend who has passed... a deity... a dream... the sun, moon, or stars) but that is not a requirement. The only requirement is that the subject matter be a crucial one to you and that your 500-750 words be focused through your thinking about/toward/for the addressee. You can tell a story in the letter (Nehisi tells several) or not, but ask yourself what "change" you are going for in this piece... (the piece will necessarily serve double-duty by *seeming* private in its format but *being* public as a production of this class, written to be shared beyond its addressee as well as *to* them... social media should have you familiar with this conundrum). As always--email with any questions.