For Next Week

Follow the syllabus, continue working on your own fiction stories, and plan to attend one or both of the Bathhouse events (see below) if you can.

Next Week Bathhouse Readings

Upcoming: BATHHOUSE EVENTS 11/5 & 11/6

Join us on November 5th and 6th as BathHouse Events and the Creative Writing Department welcomes Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant!


Readings by Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant
Tuesday, Nov. 5th, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
EMU Student Center Auditorium

And:“Textual Orality: African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices” 
A Discussion with Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant
Wednesday, Nov. 6th 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
EMU Student Center Auditorium

 

Texual Orality: African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices
The aesthetic and formal roots of African diasporic cultural production are often determined in relation to oral tradition, from poetic expression and practical education, to transmission of cosmologies and the genealogical storytelling of village griots. Celebrating and analyzing solely the oral can come at the expense of the written word, from signs and pictographs of ancient Egypt or Haiti, to the ‘spirit writing’ of African American mediums and healers. In response to this enduring but insufficient binary thinking, Tisa Bryant and Douglas Kearney devised the concept Textual Orality. Textual Orality is a way of naming this site of generative tension within African diasporic literature. Using this concept as a critical frame, Bryant and Kearney will explore the ways in which both the (il)legible and aural, the stylized mark and the spoken word, experiments in writing and traditions in performance (or vice-versa), are distinct and interdependent features of their individual writing practices and pedagogies.

 

Tisa Bryant:

            Though she hails from Boston, received an MFA from Brown University, and lives in Los Angeles, Tisa Bryant grew into her writing within San Francisco’s vibrant literary/arts communities, serving in various capacities with ATA, CineLatino, Frameline, New Langton Arts, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Small Press Traffic, and Intersection for the Arts, among others. She is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature and visual art; co-editor/founder of the ongoing cross-referenced journal of narrative and storytelling, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of War Diaries, an anthology of black gay men’s desire and survival, nominated for a 2010 LAMBDA Literary Award. Bryant is currently on a reunion tour with the poets and writers of The Dark Room Collective, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their nationally-renown African diasporic arts exhibition and reading series and she teaches fiction and experimental writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.

Douglas Kearney:

           Poet/performer/librettist DouglasKearney’s second, full-length collection of poetry, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), was Catherine Wagner’s selection for the National Poetry Series. It was also a finalist for the Pen Center USA Award in 2010. His newest chapbook, SkinMag (A5/Deadly Chaps) is available. Red Hen Press will publish Kearney’s third collection, Patter, in 2014. He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award and fellowships at Idyllwild, Cave Canem, and others. Two of his operas, Sucktionand Crescent City, have received grants from the MAPFund. Sucktion has been produced internationally. Crescent Citypremiered in Los Angeles in 2012. He has been commissioned to write and/or teach ekphrastic poetry for the Weisman Museum (Minneapolis), Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCA, SFMOMA, the Getty and the Poetry Foundation. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts.

Writing Exercise - fiction

*Make a list of four qualities that describe a character real or imagined. Place that character in a scene and write the scene so that the qualities are conveyed through significant detail. Use no generalizations and no judgments. No word on your list should appear in the scene.

This week and next

 For next week follow the syllabus and bring the text to class.

Blog response due on Juice. And there may be an in-class quiz on the book.

Otherwise keep working on writing and revising the fiction stories.


Writing exercises so far (fiction); you should be working on these; if you don't know what it is, ask someone in class:

Imitation and continuation of short-short fiction story

Description - microfiction

Postcards story

HW 10/22: Fiction Writing Assignment: Dialogue

Listen to or listen in on some other folks’ conversation. Write down what they say or remember it to write down later. Record 10-20 lines of the dialogue of a real conversation.

Use this dialogue in a story. You can create the characters around the dialogue or include the dialogue (in a single piece or separate it throughout the story) in a larger story that you construct. The story should include the dialogue as well as other story elements.

Assignments and Reminders

For next week follow the syllabus.

For next week write your blog response on fiction (from the stories or pdfs about writing fiction) in general, and your own fiction writing.  Please remember to do a blog post every week on whatever the reading assignment is for that week. See syllabus for specific guidelines.


Writing exercises so far (fiction); you should be working on these; if you don't know what it is, ask someone in class:

imitation and continuation of short-short fiction story

description - microfiction

Writing Exercises

Poem Writing exercises so far:


3 poems from the 20 word list

2-3 sonnets in whatever style you like (you can write in the style and structure of Shakespeare or be as innovative (or more innovative) than Ted Berrigan

20 Poetry Projects (pdf on EMU Online)

Response, after, inspired by poem: choose a poem from City Eclogue and write a poem in response, as a continuation, or etc.