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 Day of Silents by Ren Weber

    San Francisco Art and Film for Teens holds Art Saturday every other weekend, taking Bay Area students to the many galleries, museum exhibits, and art festivals that San Francisco has to offer. This Saturday we attended A Day of Silents at the Castro Theater. It was a full day of cinema with silent-era films set…

  • Learning How to Drive by Juliet Roll

    Recently in my junior year I have begun my venture into the world of the American streets. By that I mean I have begun learning how to drive. I’ll be honest, it’s been rough. The cinematic scene of the teenage girl hitting the road seems far from my reality of jerky steering and lurching halts…

  • Haiku by Xuan Ly

    For the past month, Heather has led the freshmen and sophomores through a six-week poetry unit. We have read and analyzed many wonderful poems such as E.E. Cummings’ “Chanson Innocente,” Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” and Rupert Brooke’s “Sonnet Reversed.” We have explored concrete poetry (or shaped poetry), open form…

  • We are now entering the fourth week of our six week poetry unit. In this unit we have discussed and practiced many aspects of poetry: the traditional forms (sonnets, quatrains, etc.), rhyme schemes, the shape of poems, concrete and abstract imagery, metaphors and similes, and more. Our studies are based on reading The Discovery of…

  • As my first year in the Creative Writing department progresses, I am beginning to notice a change in the way I observe the world, and the way I interact with others. An artist takes what is meaningful from their observations, and translates that into a language of their own; some of these can be deciphered…

  • On the Nature of the Decision… by Max Chu

    on the nature of the decision of a medium in which to create art, the nature of the title and why it is important, and the word cloud at the bottom of this website (with a side note about the not quite widely known artist Lee Lozano):   1. sometimes it comes and goes with…

  • 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…