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

  • Lately, I have been thoroughly enjoying playing with form in poetry. Our current six-week unit, poetry, has enabled me to freely experiment with the shape of the work I produce. We were recently instructed to write a piece about a vehicle of our choosing. The form of our work must correlate with the vehicle of…

  • I had heard the phrase “Creative Writing One and Creative Writing Two” tossed around before, so when Heather brought it up at the beginning of class I wasn’t completely surprised. But being a freshman, I had no idea what it meant. It turns out, midway through the semester the underclassmen and upperclassmen separate into two…

  • Finally, after a great and laborious four years, rife with chronic sleep deprivation, emotional turmoil, and the purchase of thousands upon thousands of pens that were immediately lost—either at the bottom of my backpack, my room floor, or to the grimy hands of my classmates, I, Harmony Sweetwater Johnson-Wicker have made it to senior year.…

  • With the onset of winter, the Literary Arts department has begun poetry, so for the past week Creative Writing 1 has been writing and analyzing poems daily. I have been enjoying the simplicity of theses exercises. Every afternoon I arrive for Creative Writing, and settle into the warm room for our careful analysis of a…

  • On October 24th Creative Writing welcomed in Sam Hamm for a mini-unit on Humor. We began each of our classes that week with a ditzy episode of Looney Tunes, which was then followed by a discussion on an entertaining work of writing that we had been assigned to read the night before. Parodies of the…

  • A Parody by Liam Miyar-Mullan

    I wrote this because we in creative writing were learning about parodies in a Humor unit taught by Sam Hamm. I think it is especially for those who know the geography of the West Portal area well. It is inspired by the neighborhood’s blandness and simplicity: A (West Portal) Parody of the Romeo and Juliet Balcony…

  • When introducing myself to someone for the first time, I often find myself describing myself first as a high school junior. This, by default, means that I have completed ten whole years of grade level academics and am working on my eleventh. I am now sixteen years old, and, if you count Pre-K, I have…

  • San Francisco Art & Film for Teenagers holds a weekly showing of a film at the picturesque SF Art Institute. The hike up the hill to the building is the ultimate test of faith, but makes for a great view. Prior to the film, you can watch the sun setting over the tourist district or…

  • I suppose it is customary for there to be one blog post about the show each year, and this is it. Simply, the Creative Writing Department here at The School of the Arts puts on two shows a year: a cumulative performance in Autumn and a playwriting show in Spring. Although the cumulative performance is…

  • October Heat by Xuan Ly

    “It’s like a microwave in there,” Heather exclaimed gesturing towards her office. The main classroom is no different. Within the first months of school, the Creative Writing room became notorious for the heat trapped inside; so being stuck in the there for three hours everyday isn’t always pleasant. San Francisco’s unorthodox October heat also added…