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.
Category: Creative Writing Classes
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Throughout my years in Creative Writing, when I have passed out printed copies of my poems, I have received them back with advice and questions of logic. That is what workshopping has taught us to do! Poems are brought into the workshopping space to come into themselves. So, this past unit in Creative Writing two,…
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Creative writing taught me how to notice. How to sit with a line or even a single word long enough to understand what it’s really trying to say. How to recognize when something feels off, even if I can’t name it yet. I used to think writing was about expressing what you already know. Now…
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In Creative Writing, most of our time is spent analyzing, generating, or editing writing of our own or our classmates. Through in-class prompts and external assignments, we are creating almost daily. To be surrounded by such a flourishing community of writers and in an environment that pushes both your creativity and capacity is nothing short…
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The annex! A magical place filled with the fervent creation of stories and a lot of groaning & banging your head on the wall. Every Wednesday, since my first day in Creative Writing over three years ago, the elderly senior class would lock themselves into the annex to work on their theses. Even as a…
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When I first joined the Creative Writing department, it was halfway through the school year. Right in the middle of everything. I was so lost and out of rhythm. Everyone knew what they were doing, everyone had a route. Everyone already had their buddy, and I did not. At first, I did not really feel…
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One of the most helpful parts of being in the Creative Writing department is the buddy collaboration program. At the beginning of the year, everyone gets paired with someone else, often a senior with a younger student. It’s designed mostly for freshmen, since coming into a new department can feel overwhelming, and having someone older…
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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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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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CWII had been with Maia Ipp for our poetry unit (recently ended), during which we studied Jack Spicer and his whole thing with Federico Garcia Lorca. There were a lot of bewildered questions and exasperated exclaims: “So Spicer just claimed that Lorca wrote everything in After Lorca? Even the ‘translations’ of other people’s poems? Even…
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by Olivia A. (’14) The Virgin Mary, three chambermaids who are actually literary critics, and a pigeon walk into a bar. Or a book. Today in Creative Writing 2 we finished reading After Lorca by Jack Sparrow. I mean George. I mean Spicer. Does it really matter? We read an absurdist play written by Federico…
CREATIVE WRITING 