CreativeWriting06

Making Story: Narrative Voice and Form OR Making Story: a Creative Writing Workshop

(please use the title you prefer)

Welcome to the website for the AHS Foundation Course in Creative Writing! This site is intended for the community of this course. Ever contributed to a Wiki before?

You might like to visit the pioneer Wiki of the first CreativeWriting class ever at Olin, by clicking on this link. Reading over the sample student annotations might be particularly fun.

Vitals:

Instructor Information

Name: Christina Shea

Office: Olin Center 362

Office phone: 781-292-2589

Cell phone: 617-599-8400

Email: christina.shea@olin.edu

Office Hours: Monday and Thursday by appointment.

Course Information

Course Number: AHSE1199

Meeting Time: Monday and Thursday, 10-11:50 AM

Meeting Location: ACAD 328

Course email list: Creativewriting@lists.olin.edu

After your workshop, feel free to DeCOMPRESS here.

If it's your week to do so, please enter your ReaderInquiry. Even if it's not your week, you might want to see what others are saying about the readings.

Over the course of the semester, you can sample the Annotated Journals of your peers.

FreeWRITE--curious about what others are writing in the first ten minutes of class?

Thursday, October 5 Reading Assignments in lieu of class are due on Tuesday, October 10.

World Wide Web Resources for this class:

Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky's favorite poem project is an inspiration. View in class or check it out on your own: http://www.bu.edu/favoritepoem/thevideos/index.html

Penn International-- an association of writers working to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship-- has an awesome website. Widen your horizon here: http://www.pen.org/

Ever analyzed poetry before? Bedford St. Martin's deconstructs the process: http://bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry

Sophia Coppola's Academy Award Winning Lost in Translation dramatizes the importance of setting and scene for us. http://www.lost-in-translation.com/

POST IT POEM-- I'll get the ball rolling with this poem by American hero Walt Whitman. If there's a poem you love, please click on the PostItPoem link to share it with us.

I AM THE POET

I am the poet of reality

I say the earth is not an echo

Nor man an apparition;

But that all the things seen are real,

The witness and albic dawn of things equally real

I have split the earth and the hard coal and rocks and the solid bed

of the sea

And went down to reconnoitre there a long time,

and bring back a report,

And i understand that those are postitive and dense every one

And that what they seem to the child they are

[And that the world is not joke,

Nor any part of it a sham].

Can we keep a list of the best novels we've ever read? Add your all time favorites to the You'veGottoReadThis cannon.

Our Poets on the Web-- here are some cool links to some of the poets we will be studying.

Listen to John Berryman read from his Pulitzer Prize winning Dreamsongs: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15206

Hear an interview with Dan Gerber from the Michigan Writers Series at Michigan State University: http://www.lib.msu.edu/vincent/writers/fall99/101599.htm

Don't miss this interview with and audio clips of Stephen Dobyns from the Cortland Review: http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/04/spring/stephen_dobyns_interview.html?ref=part2

Alice Fulton, find out why she's a MacArthur Genius: http://people.cornell.edu/pages/af89/intrview/intindex.html

Hear an intervew with Virginia Hamilton Adair that aired on PBS's News Hour with Jim Leher: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/september96/adair_9-4.html

Mark Doty has a new memoir: http://www.markdoty.org/

Don't miss the long-lived king-of-the-beats, Allen Ginsberg, reading "A Supermarket in California", http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15306

Gwendolyn Brooks reads her work like it's jazz, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15433

Listen to Richard Wilbur and Margaret Walker reading their work, http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/