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: The Classroom
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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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I enter the room with the big door saying Creative Writing. Emily says welcome to everybody but I have my ears blocked so I don’t hear anything, and a big fog is coming over me despite the fact that there’s sun. So, I sit at the nearest table. Nope, wrong place, so I sit at…
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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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When I first entered into Creative Writing, I was told that my grade level peers were who I would lean on, and learn to love over the course of the next four years. Thirteen-year-old me thought that was pretentious, too bold to assume. Thirteen year old me was proven wrong however, within the next year,…
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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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After a veritable forever of Maia being sick and gone, she’s finally less-sick and more-back! We welcomed her with a sign: We also expressed our fondness and love for Maia in form of algebraic graphs: (This one describes the exponential increase in the level of suckiness of Maia’s illness over the time that Maia’s gone.)…
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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…
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by Abigail (’14) Have you ever watched a Key & Peele sketch? As we discovered on Friday, November 1st, they’re not just a great way to procrastinate—they’re educational. Next time you find your cursor hovering over the YouTube icon, try these two videos: “I Said B*tch” and “Check That Sh*t Out.” While you’re watching, think…
CREATIVE WRITING 