After a relaxing weekend filled with reading, coloring, exploring the arts, and taking a stroll with nature, our class piled into the room. With our refreshed minds we prepared for our next assignment. The Essay is our last big assignment that is supposed to encompass our lives. The first day we described our golden memory, …
Category Archives: EN286
Week 1: The Ask Album
The first day of Creative Nonfiction Writing started by climbing 3 flights of stairs in Armstrong and into a packed classroom. Our professor, Felicia Chavez, set the tone waited till everyone got settled. There were 25 students in class room, 9 of them were wait-listed. We all wanted to be in the class. We all wanted …
A week of conferencing and work days
Our class all seemed to be disproportionately sick, overtired, or gloomy this morning, myself included. I think 3rd week monday of 8th block came a bit sooner than a lot of us were expecting. It’s occasionally been challenging to be fully present in this class during such a transitional time on campus. Most of our …
Workshopping; The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
Thursday and Friday of this week were consumed by workshopping all ten drafts of our final audio essays. Both days were long, rewarding and difficult. It was my first experience workshopping anything, or being workshopped, and I think most of the class was a little nervous. A writing workshop environment is so intense because you …
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Playing around with sounds (Audio Essay, Block 8)
Greetings from the Audio Essay! So, after reading an awesome article by Brendan Baker (here’s the link: http://transom.org/2014/using-music-brendan-baker/ ) our class spent the day split between peer editing our personal essay and a very fun, creative sound compilation exercise. I think the bigger sound nerds in our class got more from the Brendan Baker article than I …
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Making the Pitch
The second week of The Audio Essay started out on a note of high anxiety for me; we all made a professional story pitch. Over the weekend, our assignment was to create a formal pitch for a personal essay to debut on a radio program. Theoretically, if our pitch did well in class, it was …
Idris Goodwin’s Five Absolutes for Writing
After three days of performances in Armstrong Theater, we were all ready to start Spring Break. Idris dropped some wisdom on us before we went on our merry way, to encourage us to keep writing, revising, throw it in the air, and repeat. For those of us who are lucky enough to be in Old …
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Coconut Coated
As I promised in an earlier post, here is a recording of Xander Fehsenfeld’s “Coconut Coated”. Sweet brilliance. When we hit the road and made our class debut at Atlas Prep Middle School, the 7th and 8th graders melted into the chocolatey goodness of Xander’s words, and Sunday night was no different. The crowd of …
Classy Class in Shove Chapel
Today was a revealing day. We’re currently in the process of a major work of collaboration within our groups, and we performed 5-7 minutes of excerpts from what will soon be performed as 25-30 minute plays for our final productions. The public will be invited, so come one, come all! Here is the facebook …
Week two wasn’t too weak
‘Twas a productive week. It was a marathon of scenes, monologues, and choreopoem collaborations. We read many examples and excerpts from plays and poems and then spent the week writing and revising our own. The magic seeps through in the revisions, so we’ve been told. Idris tells us “The performance writer writes in real time. He/she …
