CREATIVE WRITING
at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco
Welcome! CW develops the art and craft of creative writing through instruction, collaboration, and respect. This blog showcases STUDENT WRITING and how to APPLY to Creative Writing.
Author: SOTA Creative Writing
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There are two classes in Creative Writing, CW1, and CW2. CW1 is generally freshmen and sophomores, CW2 two is juniors and Seniors. For a sophomore, graduating to CW2 is not a guarantee. Heather, our department head, judges whether or not to allow a student to graduate into the next class on a variety of factors…
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Workshopping in Creative Writing has helped me be more self-critical of my work. Before entering CW, workshops mostly involved comments such as: “This is so good! Maybe just include some more details in this part, but only if you want too.” These comments did not prepare me for the real world of workshopping. The idea…
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Over the summer, I had the daunting assignment of preparing a lesson plan about the poetry of my culture. As I thought about my cultural background, I realized that preparing a unit on Filipino-American poetry would be perfect. Historically, Filipino and Filipino-American history have not been taught in most schools, and most people don’t know…
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The Creative Writing II poetry unit has spanned over the course of the past month. Our artist in residence, Emily Wolahan, structured the six-week unit in a refreshing way: every other week, we read poetry and essays concerning poetry at home, then discuss them in class. Every week in between, we workshop the poems we’ve…
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On Monday, November 18, I taught a portfolio workshop at 826 Valencia with three fellow juniors in Creative Writing. As I looked at the applicants hovering over sheets of loose-leaf paper, I remembered sitting in the same room when I was an eighth grader. At a journalism workshop I took at 826 when I was…
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I’m at a stage in my life where the most helpful thing for me to do is look to the future. With college applications due in just over a month, all my thoughts have been preoccupied with who I will be and what I will do, as if I’m supposed to have a clue. This…
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I have never been particularly excited about writing poetry. I felt as if my work wasn’t “poetic” enough and I would spend hours deleting and rewriting the same line trying to tweak it into perfection. On the first day in Creative writing, I knew that our performance poetry unit was going to be our first,…
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Never before I got into Creative Writing did I actively go to readings. It was a foreign concept until about last week when I pulled up Green Apple Book’s website and picked the soonest reading. It didn’t matter to me the book or the author, I simply intended to go, watch, and go home. It…
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This last Friday, Creative Writing had our yearly poetry show. We spend the week before rehearsing and reminding everyone we see to come to the performance, and in that time, I reflected back on how much I’ve changed and grown since last year’s show. My writing has become far more precise and interesting, for one.…
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Performance poetry is usually the first unit of the year in the Creative Writing department. Last year, as a freshman with two weeks of workshopping summer work, I felt like I wasn’t ready for the unit ahead of me. Not that our performance poetry unit last year was unsatisfactory, quite the opposite. I’m sure I…
CREATIVE WRITING 