Letting The Mind Run by Sophie Fastaia

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Since the beginning of the year, our whole department has implemented a daily practice into our routines, freewriting for thirty minutes a day. We are currently in our fiction unit, reading short stories and having fruitful discussions about the embedded meaning within a piece of work. In the past, fiction was intimidating, as I’ve struggled to come up with imaginary worlds and scenarios. Sometimes writing from nothing feels messy, like I’m a toddler trying to bake a cake for the first time. The day before yesterday, without thinking, I wrote and ended up with a story about a lonely spirit wandering through space, trying to reconnect with another soul. Yesterday I wrote about a train in the afterlife that led a dead man to an unexpected place. I’ve noticed that the stories I’ve constructed revolve around the metaphysical. Fiction for me is exploring the afterlife, listening in on what the constellations gossip about, and riding the trains that travel through different planes of existence. 

I have never made writing a daily practice. Writing almost feels like a relationship, as I sit down and allow my thoughts to make themselves at home on the blank document in front of me. The subconscious appears in each piece of work, marking the page with regurgitated events and phrases from the day. Writing sometimes brings a memory that’s been swimming at the bottom of my mind to the surface, allowing me to momentarily go back in time. Each day, as I allow my creativity to have free reign, the thirty-minute timer fades out of view. I end up with stories that capture my attention, ones that refuse to walk along a designated path. I enjoy it when a story is mysterious and ends without all the questions being answered; it simply just ends when it wants to.

Art Feeds Art by Raquel Silberman

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One of my favorite benefits of being in Creative Writing is how in love with art Heather Woodward is. Often class will be positively derailed for a trip to the SFMoMA or the De Young Museum. Just the other week we joined a virtual event hosted by MoAD: “Art As We See It | Indigo Kind of Blue” in which they showcased various pieces of art (all uniquely blue) paired with music. We also had the opportunity to visit the Pacita Abad exhibit in the SFMoMA: a bright explosion of color and human experience that is impossible to unsee. Most of the time, I am so impressed and inspired by each and every visit that I wind up taking others to see it. At the sight of Abad’s underwater paintings, I recounted my dad’s stories of his time working at a tropical fish store. I was reminded of my mother’s painting style when I saw Abad’s portraits. I searched for some of her watercolor paintings of me and my sister the moment I got home. I would immediately message my parents and friends, “We’re coming back here this weekend.” Art Saturday offers any students in the Bay Area the opportunity to see and experience art for free. It was on an Art Saturday trip that I first saw “The Visitors,” a video art piece installation in the SFMoMA. “It made me appreciate being a human again,” my sister described it after going to see it herself. I have begun to think of art as the octopus in one of Pacita Abad’s paintings: a tentacle grasping and sticking to everyone who looks at it, luring us into its realm of inspiration, using its abundance of hearts to make you notice your own.

Through these spontaneous adventures, I am constantly reminded that art inspires art and I am able to embrace my own art in a new way every time I interact with new art around me. In the Kinship Exhibit at the SFMoMA, we analyzed the way that every distinct relationship a person has with something they love leaves a universal mark on them. I have made it my life’s goal to see that mark on every piece of art I come across. My mind feeds off these heart pumping and gratifying trips, inspiring new connections and leaving me with new insight that I will cherish long after I graduate. Never have I ever been so in love with art than I am now.

The Writing Process by Filip Zubatov

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In Creative Writing, we have recently begun our fiction unit with an encouraging teacher, Christian Wilburn. We started the unit with perhaps the most important part of writing, the process. The past year and a half I spent in Creative Writing, my work has been inconsistent. Sometimes I would write pieces that I would be extremely passionate about, while at other times, my work would be mundane, unenjoyable to write, and feel low effort. I would just put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and write just enough so that I would get a decent grade. I’d occasionally have these sparks of inspiration in which I could come up with a piece I would be proud of. What I have recently discovered with Christian is that writing for Creative Writing is a wild safari of demanding patience and practice. The only way one can be consistent in writing is with practice. Heather Woodward, the Creative Writing teacher, has recently assigned daily practice. This entails sitting down at your desk, or on the muni, or wherever you can. Set a timer for 30 minutes, and write. You are not allowed to edit your words and rather wait and see what comes out. To be entirely honest, a lot of my work hasn’t been top tier. A lot of the writing I have put out has been subpar, but many of the ideas have been fresh. The stories I am generating are something I can work with and eventually develop great and intricate stories out of. 

Christian has taught us the importance of turning off our internal editor. Letting the river in our minds carve a path effortlessly, without dams, and seeing where that thought ends up. In the past I did, and still do occasionally get caught in the arid desert of blank pages, desperately searching for the oasis to push me down that river. All it takes is patience. Patience will always guide you to that river. A practice Christian has taught us for coming up with ideas is to grab a piece of paper and a pen. Write a starting sentence over and over for five minutes until you can get to a phrase you can write without judgment. Christian shared a time in his life, when he had to write the same word for hours on end until he could figure out a direction to go in without thought or judgment. He would let the river flow freely. 

Creativity has its own rhythm and flow. If you were to approach it with judgment and extreme force, your writing would end up being tangled sentences that smush in with one another. One must trust their words, that every comma and every letter is a prelude to brilliance. You must be willing to not be judgmental. You need to be willing to write without thought, because when the words are on the paper, sincere thoughts will appear.

Daily Practice by Tasha Leung

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I have an unfortunate aversion to any sort of schedule. I know this, and I have known this for as long as I’ve ever been forced to follow a schedule. Whether related to soccer practice or taking vitamins, daily tasks and chores have never been my strong suit. I hate procrastinating, but it’s one of the things that I am best at doing. 

With this in mind, I assumed that I would absolutely despise having a daily writing assignment. When our teacher told us that we were going to start a practice of open ended, unprompted writing every day, I was ninety-nine percent sure that I would end up staring at an empty google doc, void of ideas. To be sure, the first ten minutes of working on it went exactly as I assumed. I twiddled my thumbs a bit, buried my phone underneath a pile of clothes, and cursed my past self for deciding that I wanted to pursue a career in writing. Yet, miraculously, this exhausting process did not continue into the wee hours of the morning. Despite my near-certain expectation that any creative inspiration would evade me, I found myself only waiting for about ten minutes. I was not writing my best work, nor was I writing anything with a point to it, but I ended up enjoying myself immensely. At first, I had been frustrated because I was stuck with the idea that everything I wrote had to be the best piece of literature known to humankind. Once I got over that idea, and started writing whatever I wanted, I had a lovely time. While I only started writing anything I wanted to spite myself, it ended up working out to my benefit. I think that one of the hardest cycles of thinking to break out of as a relatively young writer is the idea that everything I write has to be revolutionary. Many times, I’ve turned up my nose at my own writing because I see it as immature, overdramatic, or something stupidly high-school level. I get irritated when I don’t write about philosophical or mind blowing topics, but at the same time if I do try to write about something “important” enough, I get depressed at my inability to articulate what I want. I realized that this was also why I aggressively procrastinate so much. I’ve fallen into a trap of believing that if I do an average job at the last minute, I’m proving that I could have done insanely good if I’d had more time. I purposely don’t do my best because I’m afraid of what my limit is. While it definitely was an annoying lesson to learn, having a daily writing assignment emphasized to me the importance of letting yourself write terrible stories.

Stories and Their New Meanings by Pascal Lockwood-Villa

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Fiction has always been a favorite genre of mine. Whenever we can work on the craft of fictional storytelling, I always find myself simultaneously excited and intrigued. I am constantly hypothesizing on what we, as a department, could be doing differently from last school year, and the school year before that. This year, what our department head, Heather, has decided to do in order to shake up the formula, is implement two new kinds of assignments: Daily Practices, in which we write for thirty minutes every single day, and annotated responses on stories we haven’t previously read in class before. These stories are what has fascinated me in particular. So far, our current class bibliography includes (but is not limited to): “Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events” by Kevin Moffet, “My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened to the Lion Tamer” by Brendan Matthews, and just recently, “The Fog Horn” by Ray Bradbury. These stories are all individual tales that stand out from each other, yet, as a writer I am still compelled to find the similarities. Between “The Lion Tamer” and “Further Interpretations” I was able to identify how both of the main characters are embroiled in situations where they feel lessened, to some extent, by another character that bears no real animosity towards them. This revelation, among others, is exactly why this year’s fiction unit serves as a reminder to all of us Creative Writers; we are only ever done learning when we are done thinking.

Something from Nothing by Gabriel Flores Benard

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Under the instructor of our fiction teacher, Christian Wilburn, we have been doing generation exercises in preparation for our final short story project. The goal is to create many different, unfiltered story ideas and let our minds roam, hopefully unearthing a few golden ideas from the rubble. Christian told us to ask questions about preconceived ideas, genres, and overused character tropes and write about “what if” scenarios, leading to the most unusual rabbit holes. Some of my ideas included, “What if a sword screamed at you if you could not wield it correctly,” “What if Santa Claus got drunk on milk during Christmas Eve,” or “What if Heaven was set alight once you walked through the brimming gates?” Some of the rabbit holes consisted of explosive oranges and the logistics of resurrection. The entire process is entertaining yet unusual. 

One of the most difficult aspects of this assignment that my peers and I encountered was we could not listen to our internal editors as we wrote. We must place every idea we create on the page, including lots of random words strewn together. I’ll be honest, I felt uncomfortable being told that I couldn’t edit as I wrote. My writing style thrives on spitting out a multitude of words and constantly revising my ideas as I continue to write. My process allows me to streamline my otherwise incoherent ramblings into a consistent story. However, being told that you are unable to write in a way that has worked for so long is a bit jarring. I can feel the viscous, sloshing nature of my insides, and the constant desire to correct my work looms over me like a miasma, especially when I know the words I am producing are subpar at best. Regardless, I tried to make it work, and somehow the process yielded some fruitful results.

Although my Google Doc is littered with a heap of unappealing ideas, there are a few with promise. I love to write about superpowers, and I spend some of my free time reading about the different abilities of fictional characters. My brain cruised through ideas I had already written, and I manifested a superpower. Christian told us that if we had any ideas disconnected from the specific exercises we did in class, we should place them in a designated section of our Google Docs. These ideas were “ideas interruptus,” which is Latin for “interrupted ideas.” Reading that label gave me an idea: an ability to trigger random thoughts in people’s heads at will. I thought about the logistics behind that idea and its possible applications, the limits, triggers, and repercussions of such an ability. I love to theorize about random ideas, and I enjoyed generating ideas once they all revolved around the same one.

After a couple of days of pouring my brain into a Google Doc, I finally found an idea that I was happy with. These generative exercises remind me that sometimes I must break out of my comfort zone to obtain inspiration.

Fiction: The Thin Line Between the Process and Writing by Celeste Alisse

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Throughout the school year, the Creative Writing Department will have a number of different units: the poetry unit, the playwriting unit,—and my personal favorite—the fiction unit. 

Fiction, for me, has always been the best part of writing—since I was a kid I thought this. The fact that I can build a whole world in my head, and then realize my vision? Unreal. My favorite part though, is creating relationships between characters, and then developing the characters to the max, until there is no more development for me to assign them other than what is in the plot. Before I applied to Creative Writing, my bedroom walls would always be filled with green and pink sticky notes, scrambled writing all over them. 

Fiction in Creative Writing is a little different. There are no post-its on the walls—though I’m sure Heather, our director, wouldn’t be opposed to the idea, other than the mess it might make! Instead, fiction in Creative Writing relies heavily on process. Our unit teacher: Christian, has been teaching our department about procedures unique to the writer who undergoes them in preparation to write. 

At first, we were tasked with researching our favorite author’s writing process. Mine was a screenwriter, best known for introducing the emotional aspect back into horror films. Then, we were given several short stories, to which we wrote responses. After that, there were more assignments, some that seemed pointless at first, but then I began to think about them, and I thought hard. It wasn’t until a few days ago though, that I finally realized the importance of all these lessons.

 Writing is not an easy practice where someone can sit, try their hand, and write a masterpiece–yes I’m sure this has probably happened before, but my point is that it’s not usual. Writing is not even a semi-easy practice, where two rewrites gets you a masterpiece, no. Writing is an art, and just like any other, you have to practice it. Writing is a difficult feat that, when accomplished, makes one feel like they’re on top of the world. 

I’ve been lucky enough to have a few moments like that. And now, I can understand all the “pointless” assignments: they were to aid us in the practice of our art form, so that we may get to the point where we feel as though we have just achieved the world and greater. 

Living, for a Day, in a Forest by the Sea by Sophie Fastaia

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This past weekend, Creative Writing went on our annual camping trip to Kirby Cove. During community weeks, our department head, Heather Woodward, organizes the overnight trip from Saturday to Sunday morning. Although the site is difficult to get, we always manage to find a way to lock our trip into place. Heather has spearheaded this camping trip for over a decade; she chooses a handful of parents who prepare for the trip and ensure everything runs smoothly. Each year, new parents are joined by the few parents whose children graduated from our department several years ago. We bring pots, pans, pancake mix, and a grill strapped to the back of a truck to camp, merging the new and old generations. 

This year, our site was on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea and the Golden Gate Bridge. We set up our sleeping bags beneath a Juniper tree, while our chaperones began to grill sweet bell peppers and sausages for dinner (we snacked on the pile of chips that were arranged on the picnic table). One of my favorite traditions at Kirby is gathering on the beach to run across the sand, hold hands, and belly-flop into the water. After we toweled off, the seniors and some of the freshmen tried to complete a scavenger hunt full of tasks and riddles that the juniors created. 

When the night approached, we celebrated a fifteenth birthday with cinnamon-roll blondies. Every year, we sit under the moon and share our lives with each other, all cozy in our sleeping bags. Here, beneath the moonrise, we witnessed a flock of geese fly silently across the sky in a V formation. It felt as if everything was alive: the darkness weaving through the trees, the nearly silent bushes, and even the sweet, yellow moon. At Kirby, we sat on the beach in the dark, talking and getting all excited about the sea lion silhouettes popping up and disappearing into the waves; this is a memory that will stay with me, one that I will not forget. 

Beneath the eucalyptus trees, we are provided with the space to open up and become closer to each other. Each year, we pass on our traditions to the new members of the department, who will share them with the next generation of Creative Writers, even after we are gone. The nature that we are exposed to and the experiences we have at Kirby Cove inspire our writing and allow us to be vulnerable with each other in our community and in the writing that we share. I will always be grateful for Kirby Cove; to have lived, for a day, in this mystical forest by the sea.

Poet by Kendall Snipper

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I was never sure what it meant to write a poem without making it some fun game about rhyming each line. In elementary and middle school poetry assignments I would try to use the weirdest words I could find, then subsequently attempt to rhyme the word orange. I thought I was so clever using the word porridge.  For the longest time I never really took poems seriously. Most classes I’ve been in have asked their students to write an identity poem at some point in the curriculum. I always wrote straight-forward things like “I am a student. / SF is my home.” I thought that to write an identity poem you had to describe yourself point-blank. I wrote like a robot listing its code and orders. I thought maybe if I write like normal and then just break up the sentences weirdly it’ll be a good poem. 

I think the most important thing I’ve taken away from CW is what it means for me to write poetry. I never needed to describe exactly what I was for people to understand who I am. I am a poet, and my identity is imbued into every word I inscribe or type. Now, I write about the rain, skin, and the crum underneath my shoes and that is who I am. Poetry has become me, as if I am melding little bits of myself into the space surrounding me. CW pushed me to look beyond what a poem is, and glimpse at who I want to be. I learned that a poem could be anything, but the poem is always a part of you. I never needed to write an explosion to make an impact. 

What It Feels Like at the Edge of the World by Jesper Werkhoven

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After four years, it’s all going to be over. All of these experiences will culminate in a last few months worthy of remembrance, only to either be cast to dust or cherished; only time knows. This precipice is one most ominous, for it represents the final exit of childhood and the arrival into adulthood. Into a world that will chew the hopeful more ruthlessly than any school bully. It is important to consider, in the face of the encroaching future, what that all means for my writing. What will art mean for me when the world has been carved up by those lucky and lead-poisoned who were born before me? It seems ever-difficult to make a real mark on the world. Oligarchic dynasties exude childish control when things do not fill their pockets; up and coming artists represent a great expense for them in more ways than one. It is hard to be enthusiastic about the rest of the climb ahead. There has already been so much, so many unfulfilling and disgraceful moments.

This is exactly why it is worth climbing. My ultimate goal—idealistic escape from the world-grinder through what is ultimately just luck, earning enough money to live peacefully and amassing a following to acknowledge my existence, so that I may avoid the fate I fear the greatest and become an avatar of the creative drive that deserves to live alone and free from the failure of society and with the rare luxuries of peace and freedom—would not be nearly as appealing without it’s unattainability. This is the wondrous everlasting toil that encompasses life below the top: thank you economy for your generous donation to human culture. The world will be unforgiving. Especially for an artistic profession, one that must be honed deeply, with little obvious benefit to a $-eyed executive. But it will all be worth it. The toil is the last thing we all share.