In fact, what might happen if you started writing and talking about your I-Search projects during Writing Group time? Tell us how it goes!
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About Me
- Dr. Cook
- I am an Associate Professor of English and Secondary Education at Rhode Island College, where I am also the Director of the Rhode Island Writing Project.
This week Brynn brought a great prompt to our writers meeting. It had to do with how people have inner lives that are sometimes hidden from the rest of the world. After a bit of conversation about our prompt, we wrote for a while. When sharing, we came up with some common themes. We talked about the freeing nature of writing, the people who we are close to who still seem to allude us. And we had an interesting conversation about the nature of modern writing, (like blogging) where you can readily find people who don't seem to have any "inner life" because they put everything out there for public consumption. The hidden nature of "who's behind the blog?" can provide the barrior that a person needs to open their inner thoughts to the world.
ReplyDeleteI think that good writing often takes risks. There is always that lingering assumption that the writer is intimately related to their subject matter: "What kind of person writes like that (or about that.) Some of the best work I have read would have never been written if the writer would not have been willing to share some deep, hidden part of themself with the world. In various stages of our lives, there may be some things that we can't say out loud; but, what if we could write them down? What could they grow into?
Brynn here posting about Tracy's prompt this week.. IT WAS CRAZY ( not really, I just mean that I really loved it!!!)
ReplyDeleteTracy had us all write about a moment in our lives. The exercise was to blend non-fiction and fiction writing. I LOVED IT!!! The narrative could either be specific and obvious, or the meaning could be hidden. We then switched notebooks and wrote a story based on the prompt the other person wrote for us until we received our notebooks back.
I think that all writing is TRUE. Or at least, there has to be some truth to it in order for it to have any kind of a "ripple effect".
I loved to see how the "ordinary" memories we transcribed were transformed into these crazy, wonderful stories. There is such a power in creative writing... it's like you are creating a new world, where anything is possible. I don't know that we could have pulled off this type of an activity earlier in the semester. This was a trust activity. All of us really invested in this activity, despite the fact that at least half of the group had their reservations about creative writing. What blows my mind is that all of the end products were fun, creative, and interesting. To trust someone else with your writing is a truly amazing feeling... and this exercise just proved to me that whatever reservations writers may have about creative writing, with a little encouragement, everyone can do it! It's not magic! Just a little bit of trust, some fun, and a sense of humor, and you've got some potential.
Okay. There are so many threads open at this point that I'm not exactly sure where to post my latest Writer's Group posting. So I've chosen here, because it looks like it needs a little something.
ReplyDeleteWe met this week on the same day as our Golden Nugget presentations, in a room upstairs in the library facing the quad, with an excellent view and within good earshot of the campus melee which included a rendition of "Hair" on the library steps.
Shawn presented us with a black and white photograph of a street scene and introduced us to the idea of "Le Puncton" (forgive me if I'm misspelling this, Shawn). "Le Puncton" as I understand it, is generally the idea of what the viewer of a photograph is drawn to - the idea that each viewer will see something different or unique in it. We were given the choice of writing straightforwardly about what we were drawn to, or a story that this inspired. Even though those of us who had not seen the picture before were all drawn to the fight between the central figures (a fight between a boy and a goat), the way that we chose to respond to it was still different. I actually wound up writing about the things in my life that I think cause me to see what I see in the photograph. I really appreciated both the prompt to write about something that I wouldn't normally write about, AND the freedom to respond to it however I most authentically wanted to. Despite the fact that each of us had a lot on our minds that day - from our impending presentations to the spring-like activity going on just outside our windows - Writing Group felt like a respite. I realized that I've begun to really value seeing these faces and being able to share with these people on a weekly basis -- and to cherish the time set aside to write, usually about something completely different, in the middle of a busy day. It has an almost meditative effect on me. Thank you, Shawn, for again bringing something completely different to the table.
I have realized in the midst of the last weeks of school, I never posted my last entry for my writing group. Ashlee brought the group a different type of topic. One that our group found to work with differently than our other topics. As Ashlee put it, we basically see everything with our eyes. It's the way we control everything from our mind to our actions etc. Try and think back to a time where you had no control over closing your eyes or when your eyes were closed and you had to open them. She gave us an example: closing our eyes during a scary movie during the scary and disturbing scenes. Now we were ready to write. Everytime I looked up, everyone was still pondering on what to write. I wrote about theme parks, and how I close my eyes right before we dive down on a roller coaster hehe. Our group agreed that this topic led us to relive many of our scary and thrilling memories. I loved this topic, and hope to use it in the classroom. Although we do it almost unconsciously, our group realized how much our eyes shield us from what we want/do not want to see. Its one of our forms of protection?
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