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
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As kids, we’re often advised to find ways to let out anger and sadness. Find a hobby, the adults say. Join a club, or a sport. Learn martial arts, or even just hit a pillow. Scream into that same pillow. Anything but hurt other people. Then later, we’re finally told what will happen if we…
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Last week in Creative Writing we started the process of making zines (replacements for our beloved but occasionally overambitious literary journal, Umlaut). We were broken up into groups of four and tasked with coming up with an original idea for a zine. I tried to look contemplative and scribbled a few notes on my paper,…
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Pawn to e4. There are other options for sure, but it’s always a safe bet. One move into the chess game and there are already eleven common enough ways for black to respond. If both players are skilled and want a safe game, the first half of their match becomes choreographed. Certain moves just work.…
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As our final fiction project in creative writing two, we have been putting together small story collections. These collections are compromised of one nucleus story, the story that is at the core of all the other stories, and three orbital stories, shorter stories that engage in different kinds of dialogue with the nucleus story. As…
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In our seventh week of fiction, the amazing Terry Bisson has come to teach Creative Writing I a thing or two about science fiction. Science Fiction is fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets. I was…
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I started reading poetry again. Not that I really had stopped, but I hadn’t read any in maybe months. I’d been in a fiction unit in school, which meant reading it and writing strictly prose for class, and prose was all I was getting in my English class with The Great Gatsby and One Flew…
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There are a lot of assumptions about SOTA by students at other schools—that we are introverted, socially awkward, and slackers; that all we do is smoke weed and flunk easy classes and sneak out to rendezvous in Glen Park. These qualities aren’t true of anyone I know—nor are they defining characteristics of our school. Other…
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The church camp I went to in Florida was in a humid, rainy woodland. I did not know anyone there the summer of 2009. The first thing that happened at church camp was an assembly in the cafeteria. This assembly included a lecture from a greasy sixteen year-old boy. He began, “I am going to…
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On Friday night—the eve before All Hallow’s Eve, I did something I thought I would never do: I chaperoned a Halloween Dance. Well, chaperoned is a strong word—it was more along the lines of taking people’s coats and throwing them in bags for coat check and using the magical cotton candy machine to make people…
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In the East End of London, there’s a clot of people that refer to themselves and are referred to as “cockney.” The small group has gotten plenty of media through the years, being the center of plays like “Oliver” and “My Fair Lady,” mostly for their peculiar accents. Most Americans are a little less familiar…
CREATIVE WRITING 