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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The hippocampus, located in the temporal lobe of the brain, stores the majority of long-term memories created in a lifetime. For me, one half of my small hippocampus is filled with skills acquired from two years of formal creative writing lessons, while the other half is filled with unending embarrassment from workshopping terrible poems typical…
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With the poetry unit coming to an end, I feel a reluctance to move into fiction. I didn’t quite experience this in my freshman year, where I was happy to experience more fiction writing. So while I am still happy to start the fiction unit after winter break, I’m sure it’ll be difficult to get…
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On December 3rd, I attended a reading at Green Apple Books for Mimi Lok’s new publication Last of Her Name. During the reading, another writer, Dave Eggers, asked Mimi Lok multiple questions about her book. One of the most appealing parts of Mimi Lok’s reading was when she actually read from the book, which she…
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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,…
