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: Uncategorized

  • A Whole World Out There by Nadja Goldberg

    My family adopted Qora from the SPCA three and a half years ago. Qora sleeps at least fifteen hours a day, loves peanut butter and most any foods except vegetables, and can’t fetch a ball to save her life. A few months after Qora came into our home, she became more fearful of the world…

  • To me, the playwriting unit is an anxiety fueling yet fun couple of weeks. It is enjoyable because we get to learn about and read a variety of plays. Plus, I love bonding and spending time with fellow creative writers even if it is because we are stuck together for up to six hours after…

  • Here I am, in a place I have never imagined actually being in. I’m about to be a senior, or more specifically, a senior in the summer after junior year. Here is when all my morals will be tested, and I will be at the mercy of faceless bureaucracies until I get into a college.…

  • Being a freshman, playwriting was something that I had rarely tried out. As a result, I felt nervous going into this unit because it was one of the only forms of writing that I had little to no experience with. As the Creative Writing Department usually does, we read a lot of the specific kind…

  • As part of an effort to improve Creative Writing’s Middle School outreach, the director of Creative Writing, Heather Woodward, had us complete a survey detailing our reading habits in Middle School, as well as the English reading and writing assignments we completed. It seemed to me that I had read very few books, only a…

  • On the first day of CW, I was scared and sitting in my seat when suddenly Heather was all like “Dance party everybody!” and I thought “oh I’m probably gonna die.” Then we wrote to a prompt and some people read theirs and I was like “also I really don’t even hold a candle to…

  • Every once in a while, in the midst of writing all sorts of prompts and small pieces, you strike gold. It’s a rare thing, when you write a piece you can’t seem to outwrite for a long while. When it does happen, you at first don’t realize it, either. Typical, I find myself turning in…

  • Upon entering the Creative Writing Department at SOTA, I was surprised to learn that, aside from the expected Fiction and Poetry units, there would also be a Playwriting unit taught by a real playwright. I had avoided the choice to write a play for my audition portfolio—the thought of creating a whole, live scene on…

  • When I left the house on the morning of Friday, February 22, I had no idea that was the day I’d go viral. Instead of going to Chemistry class, I walked downtown and joined a small rally outside Dianne Feinstein’s office. Three young students had written a letter to Senator Feinstein urging her to support…

  • In April of 2018, I was diagnosed with a rare migraine condition known as New Daily Persistent Headache, or NDPH. The details are vague and, from what I can gather, not fully ironed out. The basics of my condition are as followed: two days before my seventeenth birthday, I was recovering from the common cold…