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

  • New York by Luna Alcorcha

    On December 24th of 2017, I awoke to the whistling of Peter Bjorn’s “Young Folks” at four o’clock in the morning with the jitters. I picked up my best friend and her mom (well, more so my father drove the car that picked them up while I was in the backseat) who seemed to be…

  • Fiction. An entirely new world for the freshman. Of course, we have all written it before, but it wasn’t fiction like this. Now there are workshops, revisions, and discussions. Almost every day we read and analyze short stories. I am starting to understand the complications and craft of creating a good short story, and it…

  • When I was very young, I would occasionally lose my temper and decide to run away from home. I would grab a paper bag from the kitchen, fill it with clothes, cookies, and cereal to keep me comfortable, and write an angry note to my parents discussing the reasons for my latest escape. I would…

  • Kar Johnson In Creative Writing II, the juniors and seniors have recently completed a unit with artist in residence Kar Johnson, where we studied the “personal” and “political” and how these labels may become interchangeable in the context of poetry. Over the course of about two months, we studied various poets such as Solmaz Sharif,…

  • CW Senior Arin Vasquez’ play, Adventures in Backpacking, which debuted at last year’s playwriting show Play On Birds, has been selected by the Marin Theatre Company as a finalist in their Young Playwrights Festival and will receive a staged reading performance! The reading will take place Saturday, March 31st at 3pm at the Marin Theatre…

  • For the six weeks preceding Winter Break, the Creative Writing Department focused on poetry. We split into Creative Writing One and Creative Writing Two, or, more simply, the underclassmen and upperclassmen. In Creative Writing One, we spent the majority of the six weeks reading from The Discovery of Poetry, a poetry anthology edited by Frances Mayes.…

  • To put it frankly, the process of applying to college is an absolutely potent pain in the ass. It can be quite awkward having write about yourself for pages, and often, one is forced to adapt a clunky, awkward syntax in order to accommodate a strict, diminutive word count. Furthermore, if you are like me…

  • As I near the end of my four years in the Creative Writing department at School of the Arts, I have begun writing my senior thesis that will embody everything I have accomplished here, from the development of my writing skill to the development of my understanding of myself and the world around me. neatly…

  • Last year, I found myself in awe of the previous sophomores and their unit lessons about their culture. I knew that there would be a day that I would be in their socks, but I didn’t think I would find myself there so quickly. When I found myself sitting with the CW I circle, poems…

  • When you google the definition of divination, what pops up is the practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by supernatural means. As always, the dictionary is half right. In life, there is a natural forward entropy, or fally-apartyness, that everything animate and inanimate possesses. Everyone will die, every country will fall…