Week Name Description
File Syllabus + Schedule

WRTG 200 - Creative Writing Studio - Fall 2018

File Ways of Responding to Readings

Every week, you'll write a creative response to a reading for that week and hand it in during class.

File How to Produce Effective Critiques

This class functions as a writing workshop. Most weeks you will critique the writing of 4 of your fellow students. So, while your individual work will be critiqued every four weeks, you will critique others’ work almost every week, except the week your own work is presented. Every week check the Moodle site to read the writing, produce and bring written critiques to class the following week.

URL How to Crit/The Purpose of Critique

"Critique is one of the most valuable components of a formal art and design education. It is also one of the most difficult aspects of the art and design school experience, especially for new students. Critique is a collaborative activity that takes quite a bit of time to learn — both in terms of how to give feedback, and how to accept feedback."

Page Writing Critique Groups

Writing Critique Groups

File Collaborative Assignment
File Portfolio Construction

Portfolio Construction

September 13: Introductions, Ideas, Expectations URL Video: "On Story" George Saunders

"In this rare appearance as a documentary subject, George Saunders reveals the pitfalls of bad storytelling and explains the openness and generosity required to breath life into great characters."

File "Whatever Works" by Janet Burroway

"You want to write. Why is it so hard?"

File Introduction + Experiments

Introduction + Experiments

URL Literary Jukebox

“This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)” by Talking Heads

September 20: Collaboration + Generosity Page "The Gathering Cloud" by J.R. Carpenter

The Gathering cloud is a hybrid print- and web-based work by J. R. Carpenter commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival 2016.

File "The Gathering Cloud" by J.R. Carpenter

“The machine sighed, and a cloudlike shape began to appear above the rows of tubes. At first it was thin and wispy. Then it thickened and became opaque.”

Jerome Fletcher, Escape from the Temple of Laughter.

Page List Poems

Read: List poems by various poets.

File Another List Poem

"Stuff to Do When Your Hometown in Burning" by Juliane Okot Bitek

URL Numbers 'were my mother tongue': How autistic savant Daniel Tammet sees language

 "Daniel Tammet is a most extraordinary man. He sees the world very differently than most people.For him, words and numbers and pictures and emotions all intermingle in his mind."

File Collaboration

Slides from September 21 class.

URL Anathema - The Gathering Cloud
September 27: Objects of Desire URL “Why the Sky and Ocean are Blue” by Rebecca Solnit

"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water."

File Bluets by Maggie Nelson

"Suppose I were to begin by saying I had fallen in love with a color."

File Objects of Desire
URL Literary Jukebox

"The Blue Distance" by Mary Chapin Carpenter

October 4: Writing Identities: Writing the Personal, Writing the Self(ie) URL "SpringTime SELFIE" by Kate Durbin

"Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based performance artist, conceptual artist, and writer. She is the author of multiple books including E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, one of the founding editors of the technological journal Gaga Stimata, curator of the Tumblr-based project Women as Objects, artist of the feminist performance piece Hello, Selfie!, and has many more leading roles in feminist projects."

File “Selfie + Ariplane Mode” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

"This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writers Leanne Betasamosake Simpson."

URL Excerpt from "My Life" by Lyn Hejinian

The emphasis [in My Life] is on writing itself, on the 'life' lived by words, phrase, clauses, and sentences, endowed with the possibility of entering upon new relationships."

URL Literary Jukebox

“Who” by David Byrne + St. Vincent

File Writing Identities

Writing Identities

URL On Edge Reading Series w/ Chris Bose

Read this poem by Chris Bose to prepare for our first On Edge Reading Series this semester which will take place on October 4 at 6 p.m. in the Aboriginal Gathering Place.

October 11: The Architecture of Prose URL Junot Diaz Discusses the Writing Process
File Structure by Jack Hodgins

Some Common Story Shapes

File On Edge Reading: Jennifer Zilm @ 6 p.m. in the Library

"Featuring a mélange of styles and forms (including sonnets, erasures, unsent emails, footnotes, session notes, CVs, tweets, and other disparate source materials), Zilm’s engaging and observant writing invites readers to investigate the curious boundaries of various therapeutic terrains-from an exploration of the esoteric world of graduate school, where the subject is religion, to a mash-up of Dante’s vision of purgatory and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), to the improbable written intersections of van Gogh’s doctors and Sylvia Plath’s therapist-subverting, sharing, and repurposing the all-too-familiar vocabularies of psychiatry, dentistry, the Bible, and academia in a humorous investigation into what it means to wait, to be a patient and to be patient, to be a student and to be a teacher, to be a healer and to be healed."

URL Literary Jukebox

Song: “You Only Live Twice” by The Postmarks

File The Architecture of Prose
October 18: Concrete and Ethereal Characters URL Miranda July: I Began with Performance

"In this film July explains how live performance allowed her to ‘engage in the present moment’ and feel the immediacy of the audience ‘right here, right now’."

File "The Swim Team" by Miranda July

"This is the story I wouldn't tell you when I was your girlfriend."

File "Dear Leader" by Damian Rogers - On Edge Reading Series

"Originally from the Detroit area, Damian Rogers now lives in Toronto where she works as the poetry editor of House of Anansi Press and as the creative director of Poetry in Voice, a national recitation contest for Canadian high-school students. Her first book of poems, Paper Radio, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award."

URL Literary-Musical Pairing

"Wheat Kings" by The Tragically Hip"

File Character Development

Character Development

October 25: Setting: The Local Locale File Read excerpt from Bone and Bread Saleema Nawaz / On Edge Reading Series

"Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond that could only have been shaped by the most unusual of childhoods -- and by shared tragedy. Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal's Hasidic community of Mile End. Together, they try to make sense of the rich, confusing brew of values, rituals, and beliefs that form their inheritance. Yet as they grow towards adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Beena catches the attention of one of the "bagel boys" and finds herself pregnant at sixteen, while Sadhana drives herself to perfectionism and anorexia.

When we first meet the adult Beena, she is grappling with a fresh grief: Sadhana has died suddenly and strangely, her body lying undiscovered for a week before anyone realizes what has happened. Beena is left with a burden of guilt and an unsettled feeling about the circumstances of her sister's death, which she sets about to uncover. Her search stirs memories and opens wounds, threatening to undo the safe, orderly existence she has painstakingly created for herself and her son."

November 1: The Musicality of Language URL Savage by Lisa Jackson

"On a summer day in the 1950s, a native girl watches the countryside go by from the backseat of a car. A woman at her kitchen table sings a lullaby in her Cree language. When the girl arrives at her destination, she undergoes a transformation that will turn the woman’s gentle voice into a howl of anger and pain."

File Maple Leaf Rag by Kaie Kellough

"Maple Leaf Rag is a dynamic, jazz-infused riff on Canadian culture. With rhythm and edge, Kaie Kellough's verbal soundscape explores belonging, dislocation and relocation, and national identity from a black Canadian perspective."

URL Kaie Kellough performs the alphabet

Kaie Kellough performs the alphabet

File Manifestos + Musicality

Manifestos + Musicality

November 8: All Apologies: Situational Writing File Read: Fatty Legs by Christy Jordan-Fenton & Margaret Pokiak-Fenton for On Edge Reading Series

Consider how archival information and historical scenarios factor into this children's book excerpt. Develop questions to ask the authors this week.

URL “Love Poem” by Dora Malech
File "The Things I Heard About You" by Alex Leslie

"The Things I Heard About You is an exploration of the limitations of precision and the unspoken, following a process whereby vignettes and landscapes break apart into fragments, rumours or suggestions of the original story. This is a book of tidal memories and elegies, love songs to the coast and all its inhabitants."

File 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso

"Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages."

File Concision + Constraints
November 15: Second Fluent: Multilingual Approaches URL “In Other Words” by Jhumpa Lahari

"In Other Words is at heart a love story — of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges of obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahari, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college."

File To Write in a Foreign Language Etel Adnan
URL Literary Jukebox

 “Le Chat Du Café Des Artistes” by Charlotte Gainsbourg

File Multilingual Approaches to Writing

Multilingual Approaches to Writing

November 22: All Writing is Rewriting File Read: Prologue for the Age of Consequence by Garth Martens for On Edge Reading Series
File Play It Again, Sam: “Development and Revision” by Janet Burroway

"Ultimately my hope is to amaze myself." — Jerry Uelsmann

URL Musical Pairing: "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed

Musical Pairing: "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed

File Revision

Revision