Course: WRTG 200 HYBRID DEMO

Weekly outline

WRTG 200 - Creative Writing Studio - Fall 2018
Welcome to WRTG 200! This is a writing studio class in which we explore the possibilities of language through different contemporary forms of writing. The goal is for you to develop a sustainable writing practice by experimenting with a range of processes and techniques. By participating in the workshops and meeting the weekly deadlines, you will develop the ability to perpetuate a strong creative writing practice within an engaged community of writers.
- Announcements Forum
- Syllabus + Schedule File
  WRTG 200 - Creative Writing Studio - Fall 2018
- Ways of Responding to Readings File
  Every week, you'll write a creative response to a reading for that week and hand it in during class.
- How to Produce Effective Critiques File
  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.
- How to Crit/The Purpose of Critique URL
  "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."
- Writing Critique Groups Page
- Collaborative Assignment File
- Portfolio Construction File
- New News Forum
  Use this space to post writing-related happenings, events, compelling connections, links or literary finds.
- The Writing Centre Manifesto: www.ecuad.ca/wc
- Purple (collaborate here) Forum
- Team Green (collaborate here) Forum
- Orange is the New Panic (collaborate here) Forum
- Gathering Cloud (collaborate here) Forum
- Discuss Lisa Robertson's work Forum
September 13: Introductions, Ideas, Expectations
- Video: "On Story" George Saunders URL
  "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."
- "Whatever Works" by Janet Burroway File
  "You want to write. Why is it so hard?"
- *Sign up for critique dates in class today.
- Introduction + Experiments File
- Literary Jukebox URL
  “This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)” by Talking Heads
September 20: Collaboration + Generosity
- "The Gathering Cloud" by J.R. Carpenter Page
  The Gathering cloud is a hybrid print- and web-based work by J. R. Carpenter commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival 2016.
- "The Gathering Cloud" by J.R. Carpenter File
  
  “The machine sighed, and a cloud–like 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.
- List Poems Page
- Another List Poem File
  "Stuff to Do When Your Hometown in Burning" by Juliane Okot Bitek
- Numbers 'were my mother tongue': How autistic savant Daniel Tammet sees language URL
  "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."
- Collaboration File
- Anathema - The Gathering Cloud URL
September 27: Objects of Desire
- “Why the Sky and Ocean are Blue” by Rebecca Solnit URL
  "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."
- Bluets by Maggie Nelson File
  "Suppose I were to begin by saying I had fallen in love with a color."
- Members of Group One Post 1-2 Pages Here by September 27 - Everyone else reads and brings written critiques to class October 4 Forum
- Objects of Desire File
- Literary Jukebox URL
  "The Blue Distance" by Mary Chapin Carpenter
October 4: Writing Identities: Writing the Personal, Writing the Self(ie)
- "SpringTime SELFIE" by Kate Durbin URL
  "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."
- “Selfie + Ariplane Mode” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson File
  "This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writers Leanne Betasamosake Simpson."
- Excerpt from "My Life" by Lyn Hejinian URL
  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."
- Members of Group 2 Post 1-2 pages here by Oct 4 - Everyone reads and brings written critiques to class Oct 11 Forum
- Literary Jukebox URL
  “Who” by David Byrne + St. Vincent
- Writing Identities File
- On Edge Reading Series w/ Chris Bose URL
  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
- Junot Diaz Discusses the Writing Process URL
- Structure by Jack Hodgins File
  Some Common Story Shapes
- On Edge Reading: Jennifer Zilm @ 6 p.m. in the Library File
  "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."
- Members of Group 3 posts 1-2 pages here Oct 11 - Everyone reads and brings critiques to class Oct 18 Forum
- Literary Jukebox URL
  
  Song: “You Only Live Twice” by The Postmarks
- The Architecture of Prose File
October 18: Concrete and Ethereal Characters
- Miranda July: I Began with Performance URL
  "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’."
- "The Swim Team" by Miranda July File
  "This is the story I wouldn't tell you when I was your girlfriend."
- "Dear Leader" by Damian Rogers - On Edge Reading Series File
  "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."
- Members of Group 4 post 1- 2 pages here Oct 18 - Everyone reads and brings critiques to class Oct 25 Forum
- Literary-Musical Pairing URL
- Character Development File
October 25: Setting: The Local Locale
- Read excerpt from Bone and Bread Saleema Nawaz / On Edge Reading Series File
  "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."
- Group 1 Posts 4-5 pages here by Oct 25. Everyone reads and brings written critiques to class Nov 1 Forum
- Collaborative Projects Due
November 1: The Musicality of Language
- Savage by Lisa Jackson URL
  "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."
- Maple Leaf Rag by Kaie Kellough File
  "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."
- Kaie Kellough performs the alphabet URL
- Group 2 Posts 4-5 pages of writing here by Nov 1. Everyone else writes critiques and brings to class on Nov 8 Forum
- Manifestos + Musicality File
November 8: All Apologies: Situational Writing
- Read: Fatty Legs by Christy Jordan-Fenton & Margaret Pokiak-Fenton for On Edge Reading Series File
  Consider how archival information and historical scenarios factor into this children's book excerpt. Develop questions to ask the authors this week.
- “Love Poem” by Dora Malech URL
- "The Things I Heard About You" by Alex Leslie File
  "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."
- 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso File
  "Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages."
- Group 3 Posts 4-5 pages here Nov 8. Everyone else writes critiques and brings to class Nov 15 Forum
- Concision + Constraints File
November 15: Second Fluent: Multilingual Approaches
- “In Other Words” by Jhumpa Lahari URL
  "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."
- To Write in a Foreign Language Etel Adnan File
- Group 4 posts 4-5 pages here Nov 15 - Everyone brings critiques to class Nov 22 Forum
- Literary Jukebox URL
  “Le Chat Du Café Des Artistes” by Charlotte Gainsbourg
- Multilingual Approaches to Writing File
November 22: All Writing is Rewriting
- 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 File
  "Ultimately my hope is to amaze myself." — Jerry Uelsmann
- Post an example of a revision of your writing here Forum
- Musical Pairing: "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed URL
- Revision File
November 29: Celebration! Class Reading.
- *Class Reading w/ potluck in the classroom! Bring snacks enough for 3-4 people.
December 6 + 13 Individual Meetings
28 September - 4 October
Not available
5 October - 11 October
Not available