12.10.13

Portfolio Intro

1. Organize your portfolio in a way that is meaningful to you and create a Table of Contents. (Feel free to be creative here too—or offer relevant info/abstract/descriptions of which assignment the piece grew out of).

2. Flip through your work (again and again) and think about the various processes you went through this semester. 

3. Write a HIGHLY descriptive Introduction to yourself and your work (3-5 pages). You may choose to write this in any style you see fit (think our meta-assignment if you like)—first or third person... formal, informal… etc.

           

4. Explain how you have arranged the pieces and what you learned about yourself as a writer and as a human being this fall. Address all of these issues:

            A. The reading (professional and craft-oriented and your peers’)

            B. The writing (both the original process and revision)

            C. The critiquing (as peer-partner and as line-editor/as a critiquer and as a critiquee)

           

________________________________________________________________________

*At the beginning of each piece you offer—please include a brief explanation of why you chose the assignment and what your revision process entailed—no more than a paragraph is necessary. BE as creative as the spirit moves you to be. Strike that—be more creative. But be INSIGHTFUL. Look at your own work with the critical eye that you have been developing all semester. BE HONEST with yourself (the risk I am looking for).

Feel free to highlight, sticky-note, underline and use visual aides.... feel free to GO CRAZY, as long as you reflect upon and analyze honestly your development as a writing human.

Do not 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, 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.

YOUR PORTFOLIO IN ITS ENTIRETY IS DUE TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17^th IN MY MAILBOX (or stop by and hand-deliver)

Enjoy your break.

12.3.2013

Reminder--

From the Raymond Queneau book-- Exercises of Style.  You pick 10 sentences from 10 different revisions and then write your own story to connect them (which doesn't have to have anything to do with his story at all.)  No length limit.

11.13.2013

Read these: Going for a Beer  by Robert Coover, Notes from the Hospital by Ben Marcus. The Landing by Lydia Davis.

Complete one of the 3 assignments for todays class--or find a way to combine them.

11.1.2013

For Tuesday and Thursday of this week:

Make sure you have caught up on the readings of short stories... we will be discussing The Bound Man (in Art of the Tale), and A&P by John Updike. (<<< you can click on the link behind)

Assignment (due Thursday Nov 7th):

Take a cliché... such as "I'm tied up in knots" or "he was the cat's pajamas" or "he thought the world revolved around him"-- and write a scene or story that literalizes the figurative language.

This is probably NOT where "The Bound Man" came from--but it could have been. He was both "all tied up" and the woman in the story "cut him loose."

Clichés come from really apt metaphors that lose the concrete comparison over time. They are the fictions that "lie in the service of truth-telling."  Your job is to re-investsome of this hackneyed language with meaning again.

Suggestions: use a phrase that means something to you now--or that you use often.  Dig at why it works for you. Imagine the first story of its use (this is just one road you cd take... like the just-so Kipling stories "How the Leopard got its spots" etc. You cd write "how 'right as rain' came to be)... or not.

As always, this can be part of a longer project you are working on, or it can be a stand alone piece.

Good luck.

10.29.2013

For Halloween:

Read (or re-read) in MSF: Snapshot, Blue Moon, and Explosion.

Also "The Bound Man" in Art of the Tale

From now on, be prepared for me to collect your in-line edits and grade them on effort.

10.22.13

For Thursday Jennifer Egan's THE BLACK BOX

and in Art of the Tale read "Unguided Tale" by Susan Sontag (p.666)

Please bring Art of the Tale and Making Shapely Fiction to class.

GROUP A brings work for us Thursday.

They are: Kim P, Kim H, Jacqui, Caitlin, Andrew

11.16.2013

For Tuesday

Read The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
and Free Radicals by Alice Munro

Please print them out if you can so we can look at passages in class.

Thank you!