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Keep a Writer's Journal Like the Pros (10 Weeks)
Learn to emulate the strategies famous writers demonstrate in their journals as well as strategies from literature to keep a journal that is wittier and smarter than you ever thought you could be!
Writers write. That's the simplest definition of the role. And sometimes writers write in journals--when they are between projects, when they need to keep notes for a project, when they are hoping to find something to write about, when they have to rid themselves of distracting thoughts and when they just want to keep the words flowing.
If you like the idea of seeing into the strategies of other writers to find your own smartest, funniest, most sincere, most outrageous, and most I-never-thought-I-could-write-like-that writing, this class is for you. Over ten weeks, we will look at other writer's work and journals and delve into the task of seeing what happens when we take those strategies on for expressing ourselves.
Class Outline
Each week, you will receive emailed courseware that includes writing tasks for that week's journal keeping.
Students will email the outcomes of their exercise writing to the class. Class members as well as the instructor will offer response that shows appreciation for what you have created and how you might use it in future writing. In other words, this class is not about critiquing or criticizing but about response--what happens inside the reader as a consequence of reading the entry--sadness, connection, awareness, happiness, or awe for example. You are also encouraged to tell the writer of the entry where you became confused or distracted or left out--this allows the writer to become aware of opportunities to add more in their writing and to become sensitive to tone changes--the way the mind instructs us to change the subject or summarize when it is worried about vulnerability. You can review the instructor's formal description of this process, called the three-step response method at http://writingitreal.com/cgi-bin/sec_index.pl?ID=279.
Using a less formal version of this response method, journaling participants will provide and receive the kind of empowering help they need to learn more about what they created and how they might use it in future writing.
Here is a course outline, although as the class progresses, some weeks this content might be slightly different than in the outline:
CLASS OUTLINE
Week 1: What is a writer's journal? The lesson includes emailed materials and an online discussion of the tools of the craft of creative writing and how these tools help the journal keeper.
Week 2: Finding the Tourist Within: An exercise with six extensions inspired by the journal writing of novelists Robert Hellenga and Chitra Divakaruni. Students can write in response to as many of the extensions as they please over the course of week one. There will be an online discussion of what we find admirable in the journal entries and how they might lend themselves to a more developed writing endeavor.
Week 3: A Walker in the City (or Town): Inspired Alfred Kazin's words, this lesson offers another journaling exercise with six extensions. Again, students can write in response to as many of the extensions as they please over the course of the week and there will be an online discussion of the writing and the eventual use of the words in a larger project.
Week 4: Whistling: Inspired by a character in Elizabeth Evans' novel Carter Clay, this week's exercise and six extensions will revolve around music. Again, students can post any number of results and in an online discussion we will respond to the writing and share ideas of what each author might want to develop in future writing.
Week 5: Musings, Meditations, and Tidbits: Inspired by the journal excerpts of William Matthews, Denise Levertov and Ron Carlson, this week's exercise and six extensions will have class participants amazing themselves with their wisdom and wit. Our online discussion will focus on the exercise results in light of how this wit and wisdom informs us about ourselves as writers.
Week 6: Dreams, Dreams, Dreams: Information on how writers use their dreams in journaling and story telling and an exercise with six extensions to have you doing it, too (Don't worry--if you can't remember your dreams, you can still do the exercises!). Our online discussion of this week's journaling results will focus on weaving dream state moods into our writing.
Week 7: First You Have to Teach a Lesson: Based on Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, How I Learned to Drive, this exercise and its six extensions will have you using what you know how to do as metaphor for life knowledge. Our online discussion will focus on the strength of using metaphor in this way and how you can use what you create in a longer piece of writing.
Week 8: Eating Alone and With Others: Inspired by the poetry of James Mitsui, Li Young Lee, and others as well as prose about food at home, overseas and in restaurants, we will try our own hands at melding food writing with writing from the heart about love and loss. Students will respond to up to seven exercises (the main one and its six extensions) and our online discussion will focus on how the journal writing suggests avenues for future writing or can itself become a poem.
Week 9: Self-Reflection: How to use the repeated words, phrases and thoughts in your journaling to find your obsessions and passions and the places you've touched on that are worthy of more exploration (where your writing will reach new heights). Our online discussion will be in response to students posting the results of exercises that have them mining their eight weeks of journal keeping.
Week 10: Now What? Journaling exercises to keep you writing like the pros for months, even years, to come!
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Genre Flipping: Becoming Ambidextrous with Poetry and Prose
If you want to write poetry and don't feel that you are a poet,learn how to start with prose and identify and extract lyric elements to shape poetry. If you are a poet and don't think prose is your style, learn to find the narrative qualities in your poetry and lengthen your work. If you have longed to write poetry or to turn poems into longer pieces, or to put more feeling and emotion into your sentences, use this class to accomplish your goals. You can start from scratch with exercises supplied by the instructor or you can work on turning journal entries into finished, focused, moving work. You can also take older work and revisit it to find the poems and stories and essays you may have lying inside them.
Sometimes, for poets, work disappoints, arriving in paragraphs that don't look like they can be made into poems. Sometimes the poem arrives without enough narrative to ground it in the world and make it understandable to the reader. And sometimes, for prose writers, work arrives in "clunky" paragraphs that lack the imagery and emotion that moves readers. In this class, you will learn how to look at what you have written and decide if there is a poem in the prose or if a story or essay might come from the poem you created. In addition to studying lyric and narrative values and how they operate in both poems and prose, you will also explore forms on the borders of the genres: "prose-poems" sometimes called "flash nonfiction" and the "lyric essay." You will receive emailed examples and links to writing online for samples that will serve as a basis for discussion about technique. You will also be assigned writing tasks for creating and developing the poetry or prose you want.
By the third week, students will be looking into their own and their classmates' work with an eye and ear toward changing the genre from the original presentation on the page and developing it into moving prose or poetry. Students will email the outcomes of their exercise writing to the class. Class members as well as the instructor will offer response. The best help in appreciating what you have created and how you might use it in future writing comes from response, not criticism. Students will receive the kind of empowering help they need to learn more about what they created and how they might use it in future writing.
Class Outline
Week 1: Poems Versus Prose: How are they the same and how are they different? How do we know? Class material will contain examples of poems and prose that seem to move the reader similarly, and via email, the class will discuss the writing and its attributes.
Week 2: Students will read articles documenting two people's experience turning one genre into another. Using a prompt, students will write a piece to submit to the group (or they may use a previous journal entry or piece of writing),identifying whether they want it to ultimately become a poem or a piece of prose.
Week 3: Classmates and the instructor will offer response to the writing and the instructor will provide prompts that will help students yield the poem or prose piece they desire.
Week 4: Students will submit a revision of this initial work and the class will notice what happened as the words expanded or contracted into poetry or prose.
Week 5: Students will start a piece intentionally written as "flash nonfiction" or a "prose poem" after reading posted examples and may post work-in-progress for response.
Week 6: Students will start a "lyric essay" or "poem in parts" using the instructor's Three-Days and Three-Nights exercise and discussing other student results.
Week 7: Students will choose one of their pieces from the past two weeks and post it for response. Students and the instructor will offer detailed response to the work.
Week 8: Class discussion will revolve around a further revision of the piece responded to in week 7.
Week 9: The instructor will offer more exercises for beefing up the poetry in your work and for maintaining clarity with narration, to keep you writng for months to come, in poetry or in prose.
Week 10: Students will post one exercise result for class response so they leave class working on revision.
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Revision, Revision, Revision
"Give us your tired, your poor" rings in my ears when I approach revising pieces I have held onto but don't know what to do with--I say these lines from Emma Lazurus's poem "The New Colossus," and think of the Stature of Liberty, where they appear. Why not enroll in a class where you can work on revising older pieces of your work over ten weeks and learn how to use peer response that is truly helpful as well as learn what to look for when you are revising? Whether you have journal entries yearning to be freed as stories, poems and essays or you have promising starts for poems, fiction, and nonfiction, use this class to get professional and peer response and successfully rewrite what you have on hand, producing new versions of up to ten pieces. If you want to concentrate on revision but don't have accumulated work, I'll supply prompts to get you started on writing that you can work out further using the revision techniques shared in this class.
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Writing Grief
So many of us have suffered severe losses - pregnancies, children, spouses, parents, marriages, health, houses, jobs and opportunities we longed to fulfill. We may have lost our sense of ourselves because of helplessness in the face of loss. Writing can not change the pain or sorrow we suffer but it can help us figure out how to come to terms with it and find a way to hold it in our lives and go on. It can help us find a route to being able to feel all of our feelings so we may also feel the joy in our lives. Writing allows us to reconstruct and retrieve people, places and times, so we know we will never lose them.
In this class we will use excerpts from the work of Elizabeth Bishop (in particular, The Art of Losing), Mary Jo Bangs (poems from her book Elegy), the instructor's prose manuscript (A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, forthcoming Sept/Oct 2009 from Imago), the work of Rabbi David J. Wolpe (Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times), and the work of Madge McKeithen (Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change) among several others. Although poetry is a good starting point for writing grief, prose can be the result of this inspiration and participants will work in either or both. Class exercises and discussion will be geared toward helping participants develop and revise new work and/or revise work they started prior to class. A gentle, empowering response method will help everyone see where they can say more and write the story and feelings they want to explore.
This class will run for five weeks:
Week One: What are we doing when we are writing grief? Online class discussion on the course readings.
Week Two: Exercises to get started on your writing and/or see into the shape of writing you have already begun
Week Three: Responses from the instructor and classmates on drafts of pieces each participant wants to post.
Week Four: Working on revisions of the writing based on the response gathered from classmates and the instructor
Week Five: A week for response to further revisions.
(Note: Weeks Four and Five will also include more exercises for those who want to get started on additional writing.)
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