I just read Fra Keeler by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi, a short novel I’m planning on teaching in my upper division Contemporary Forms class this fall, a lit class for creative writers that investigates notions of “the contemporary.” I’m still figuring out the thrust of the class, though I know we’ll be using Foucault’s Archaeology[…]
Unconventional Creative Writing: Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit
In thinking about new approaches to teaching creative writing, approaches that don’t rely so much on the idea of “craft” (more on this in another post) as they do on exploration, close reading, and method (or practice), I thought I’d take a look at Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. Known as conceptual art, this collection of “event scores,” instructions[…]
Writing Exercises and Creativity in the Writing Workshop
I assign a lot of writing in my creative writing classes in the form of exercises–I suspect I’m not unique in this. I’ve found that creative writing experiments are sometimes the most interesting writing a student will do all semester–the most generative, creative, and energetic writing, but also the writing that often takes the most risks.[…]