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.

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  • Remapping to Find Enlightenment by Xuan Ly

    The hippocampus, located in the temporal lobe of the brain, stores the majority of long-term memories created in a lifetime. For me, one half of my small hippocampus is filled with skills acquired from two years of formal creative writing lessons, while the other half is filled with unending embarrassment from workshopping terrible poems typical of an underclassman. The stabilization of neural connections that allow a memory to become “long-term” has helped me to build a vast literary toolbox. This has led me to believe that, as the years went by, all the lessons and writing exercises would lead to a period of literary enlightenment in which I would finally understand my own voice and along with it, the true meaning of being an artist. 

    For nearly the entirety of last year, I focused on writing through sickness, which I had observed on a day-to-day basis. While this emotionally charged writing helped me process grief and connect more deeply with my culture’s complex history of colonization and war, this year, my frontal cortex, the hub of creative thinking, has rejected any beginnings of work written in the same emotional realm as last year’s. This reaction places my almond sized amygdala, which dictates emotional survival, at fault. I have cultivated an irrational fear towards the thought of overusing a common traumatic experience to the point of inauthenticity and having the repetitive topic become the cause of meticulously hidden annoyance from peers, only shown in hallway snickers after school when I have already left for home. 

    Here is where I encounter the issue that withholds me from the literary enlightenment (which I thought I could find in the CW2 seminar room). It is simply this: I have not found my true voice. I spent freshman year learning mechanics, sophomore year seeing writing monochromatically, and now what? My frontal cortex is at a standstill; no longer has a go-to sob story where my emotions are still fresh enough to pull from. And instead of writing until I find a flow, or even writing at all, my amygdala has made itself comfortable in the town of Perpetual Flight Response, which is situated across the river from the village of A Healthy Balance Between Fight And Flight. Is it possible that artistic enlightenment resides across the river as well?

    I have been told that my writings, once stripped down, circle most evidently around human interactions and relationships. But isn’t everything, once stripped down, about interactions? Whether with the environment, oneself, or others, isn’t writing most commonly the description of a chain of reactions? 

    The orbital part of my prefrontal cortex spearheads social behavior and emotional rewards. For years, I spent life solely inside this part of the brain. In short: I was a people pleaser. And in order to pull that off, I had to remain observant. Since this part of me has not entirely fizzled, the habit of observation persists and has been deemed critical for the specificity required of writers. 

    I suppose that is where I should root my road to artistic enlightenment: in observation. 

    By Xuan Ly

    Class of 2021

  • Moving Into Fiction by Zai Deriu

    Moving Into Fiction by Zai Deriu

    With the poetry unit coming to an end, I feel a reluctance to move into fiction. I didn’t quite experience this in my freshman year, where I was happy to experience more fiction writing. So while I am still happy to start the fiction unit after winter break, I’m sure it’ll be difficult to get back to a less abstract mindset. Being so focused on poetry, I haven’t written a full-length short story since the summer, almost six months ago, which is odd to say. Summer doesn’t feel that far away at all.

    Last year, however, my feelings going into fiction were quite the opposite. My poems tended to start nicely but trail off towards the end, and I felt frustrated with the abstract nature of the poetry I read. I was eager to move on to fiction because I felt better versed in it than I did with poetry. I’d read many books and written in and out of school since I was a child, but not many of those experiences were with poetry. In elementary school, I had even attempted to write a book. I’d like to believe it was good for a third grader. I struggled to analyze and write poetry more than fiction, simply for lack of exposure. 

    Over the past summer, however, writing poetry began coming to me more easily, and I was excited to start school and begin with poetry. I remember in the previous year struggling to write respond to homework prompts. I spent far too long searching for what I wanted to say and run out of time writing it all down. What to write about now comes to mind faster.

    Through this year’s poetry unit, I have picked up so much more than I did in my freshman year. So going into this year’s fiction unit, I feel happy at all the progress I’ve made in the previous poetry unit and eager to make just as much progress in fiction.

    By Zai Deriu

    Class of 2022

  • Mimi Lok by Jude Wong

    Mimi Lok by Jude Wong

    On December 3rd, I attended a reading at Green Apple Books for Mimi Lok’s new publication Last of Her Name. During the reading, another writer, Dave Eggers, asked Mimi Lok multiple questions about her book. One of the most appealing parts of Mimi Lok’s reading was when she actually read from the book, which she did with confidence as if she had memorized the excerpt. I  noticed that she made successful jokes. The feeling was as if she was at a dinner party, trying to lighten the mood. 

    Lok tried to look into everyone’s eyes while she read so that they would pay attention. It worked very well, when she turned towards me, I immediately grasped onto every word. During her reading, Lok often asked if she was loud enough or too slow, to make sure everyone there could understand what she was saying.

    Since it was such a small space, it felt like I got close and personal with the author, allowing me to soak in everything she said. The main thing this reading got across was that she represented many unheard and ignored voices in the world. For example, an old homeless lady who had nowhere else to go. Right before Lok opened the floor for questions,  she briefly discussed her editing process. She would often send half-written stories to her editor, who is a Buddhist priest who understood underlying patterns in Lok’s work. One pattern was the fact that Lok tended to-do lists of images, so the editor learned to work with that. Dave Eggers asked, “How do you get inspiration for your stories?” Lok replied by saying that she had heard a news story about a woman living in a man’s closet for a  year, so she wrote about a granny who decided to live in a man’s closet. She wanted the audience to know that real-world inspiration is a great inspiration.

    While listening to one of the stories in Last of Her Name, Lok used lists to make imagery. She would list images like all the foods Granny Ng planned to steal then pulled them together by showing how they all connected. Making them all form a setting in which the reader could imagine. In the end, as a bonus, there was an array of Pocky and White Rabbit candies. 

    By Jude Wong

    Class of 2023

  • Teacher for a Day by Benny Leuty

    Teacher for a Day by Benny Leuty

    There are two classes in Creative Writing, CW1, and CW2. CW1 is generally freshmen and sophomores, CW2 two is juniors and Seniors. For a sophomore, graduating to CW2 is not a guarantee. Heather, our department head, judges whether or not to allow a student to graduate into the next class on a variety of factors including how they contribute to the community and their maturity and work ethic. So for a sophomore, a lot rests on their cultural heritage lesson.

    Each year, every sophomore puts together a one day lesson on their cultural heritage centered around its poetry. It is, for sophomores, the ultimate chance to demonstrate to Heather their maturity and growth and with CW2 on the horizon, the stakes are even higher.

    For my sophomore lesson, I decided to teach Philip Levine’s poetry on the industrial midwest. Initially, I was intensely dreading teaching my lesson. Yet as I began to work on its outline over Thanksgiving Break, I had a change of heart. Through researching the poet and Detroit during the 1940s and 1950s, (the time in which Philip Levine lived) I connected with my home state of Michigan more than I ever had before. I also discovered quite a lot about my family history as my father told me about his hometown after the washing machine company Whirlpool closed their factories, my mother told me about her time working in a Detroit factory during college, and about how my grandfather covered the raging war between the auto companies and the unions during his time as a photographer for the Detroit News.

    All in all, I learned more about myself, my family, and of course Philip Levine than ever before. And when I eventually gave my lesson, it was a great time.

    By Benny Leuty

    Class of 2022

  • Workshopping by Isabella Hansen

    Workshopping by Isabella Hansen

    Workshopping in Creative Writing has helped me be more self-critical of my work. Before entering CW, workshops mostly involved comments such as: “This is so good! Maybe just include some more details in this part, but only if you want too.” These comments did not prepare me for the real world of workshopping. The idea of sharing my work with more experienced upperclassmen was daunting to my freshman self. At my first workshop, I read my poem aloud and nervously waited for my peers to give their feedback. I came out of the experience more comfortable sharing my work with others. It gave me a renewed want to improve my writing. Workshopping made me notice points in my poetry where I could grow and expand on my ideas where I wouldn’t have noticed them before. I realized everyone just wanted to improve my work and to make it the best it can be. A part of me was wary of workshopping my writing because it felt personal and the critique would feel like a judgment of my ability as a writer.  When going through all of the poems that I wrote for my portfolio to get into the Creative Writing department and compared them to my revised poems, I saw how much I have improved thanks to examining my work through a critical lens and in a group setting. 

    After my realization that the process of editing my writing isn’t as daunting as it first seemed,  I find myself looking forward to working with poems that I feel need help. For Thanksgiving break, we are supposed to revise three poems for Monday and after the workshops, I now have notes and edit suggestions to use. I see where I went wrong with clichés and vague images. While I still haven’t eased out of my shy shell, I can now receive feedback without shock and bewilderment.

    Recently, I had the opportunity to workshop with some of my fellow freshmen. I was proud of the progress we all made and I could see the improvement in all of our poetry. Workshopping was a valuable way to close off the week and to take a look at the progress we all made, and relish the fact that we survived three whole months of high school.

    By Isabella Hansen

    Class of 2023

  • Filipino Cultural Heritage Poetry Unit by Parker Burrows

    Over the summer, I had the daunting assignment of preparing a lesson plan about the poetry of my culture. As I thought about my cultural background, I realized that preparing a unit on Filipino-American poetry would be perfect. Historically, Filipino and Filipino-American history have not been taught in most schools, and most people don’t know about topics such as Filipino immigration, and the Philippine-American war, which I believe should be basic history education. 

    I also decided upon the lesson because of my own desire to connect with my culture. I haven’t met many Filipinos my age, and I hadn’t learned anything about Filipino culture before I began research on my lesson. I was feeling disconnected from myself, and by researching this lesson through the internet, books, and talking to family members, I began to gain a deeper appreciation for my family and my cultural background. 

    The lesson itself was quite successful. I decided to focus on the late Filipino-American poet and activist Al Robles, a native of San Francisco who was strongly involved in pro-Filipino movements, such as protesting the demolition of the International Hotel, a popular shelter for many Filipino immigrants. Although the poetry was all from the same author, Robles writes his poetry from a range of voices and topics; one poem was about a wandering immigrant, another was about ethnic empowerment. Each of the poems had various cultural references, which I explained individually, using a slideshow. There was an overarching theme of desperation to assimilate and fit in to American culture, which I felt both related to the theme of my lesson (teaching about forgotten Filipino stories) and to my personal identity (feeling lost and disconnected from oneself). The whole class was engaged and participated enthusiastically in each of the poetry discussions. I wanted to help the class understand the different emotions that Filipino-American immigrants felt during their journey to America, so I gave relevant writing prompts. I asked people to write about a poem about a character who undertakes a difficult journey (like the Filipinos on their way to America), and a poem about feeling extreme desperation (like the Filipinos who are desperate to assimilate in order to have a prosperous life).

    I was not the only one who shared my personal experiences. Assistant Principal Monette Benitez, and Spoken Arts head Aimee Suzara were both invited to participate in my lesson, and they spoke about growing up as Filipina women. They echoed similar sentiments as I did, such as feeling disconnected from their heritage and “whitewashed.” Suzara even shared poetry from her book Souvenir, including one striking poem about challenging her high school history teacher to teach about Filipino history. 

    At the end of the lesson, many people wrote in their feedback cards that they previously had little to no knowledge about Filipino culture, and that my lesson was informative. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to educate people about important topics that I care about and are frequently ignored.

  • Creative Writing II Poetry Unit by Tess Horton

    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 produced throughout the previous week. This intensive poetry-production-process has tested my ability to constantly keep up the motivation to write. I’ve written poems I like, I’ve written poems I don’t like as much, but the important part of this exercise is that I am writing at all.

    Part of the weeks when we aren’t revising is to respond to various in-class prompts that Emily gives us (usually in some relation to a poem/essay we’ve read); one of the prompts I have particularly enjoyed so far was the haibun prompt. A haibun is a three-paragraph prose poem followed by a haiku at the end. Here is the haibun I wrote in response:

    The Tambourine Man Haibun

    I met the tambourine man behind the carousel when I was a good age. I am not sure whether I was supposed to meet the tambourine man or not. He was sinking in his pinstriped cloak and the hairs shaking on his upper lip seemed to shine, like the black armor beetles sport even on hot Saturdays. The tambourine man was red in many unnatural places. Red on his scalp. Red on his chin and only on the tips of his fingers. Red on the sagging parts of his pants where his skinny knees were supposed to fit. Skinny knees, I thought. The air was hot and I was suddenly glad I wasn’t wearing anything underneath my dress. The tambourine man looked down at me and slapped his hand on his wrist as if he were expecting hard cow skin instead. I was three feet and his bulging sunshine boots were perfect.

     

    Yellow morning was the time I put on sunscreen. The day is early and cold with the promise of heat and pink skin later. White cream becomes a pocket item. I hare that white cream. That white cream is sticky, it sticks to my tongue for many hours after I taste it on my thumb. Soap, like soap. Tied down to a felt seat backwards: is this supposed to be fun? I am sad with the white cream. This morning feels like a white box, sterile from its lack of color, and I feel as if I am suffocating in its whiteness, its medicinal taste.

     

    The circus is wet and dark. The tent is orange, tethered firmly to the dew-grass beneath the tarp, and when my father opens the front curtain and we enter as a family, the white cream against his lapel smears. This tent is large and dark. The tambourine man plays his cowskin arm off to the side, quiet. I smile at him from my mother’s shoulders.

     

    With a gentle hand

    The tambourine man leans downwards to greet me

    The cream on my hands is sticky, yellow shoes slip against the mud

     

    -Tess Horton, class of 2021

  • Workshops, Change, and Community By Nadja Goldberg

    On Monday, November 18, I taught a portfolio workshop at 826 Valencia with three fellow juniors in Creative Writing. As I looked at the applicants hovering over sheets of loose-leaf paper, I remembered sitting in the same room when I was an eighth grader.

    At a journalism workshop I took at 826 when I was eight, I wrote an article titled “Too Many Walgreen’s!” prompted by a record store near my house turning into a Walgreen’s. I took another workshop in which each student brought in a special object to draw and write about. Unlike these previous two workshops, the one in eighth grade amounted to something more. I was not in the warmly-lit back room seeking only a writing activity. I was seeking acceptance into SOTA’s Creative Writing Department in which workshops would become part of my everyday life. Students around me read their work to each other and made playful comments. I became doubtful of myself and my writing when the boy next to me told me my poetry was “bad.”

    A student in Creative Writing read my short story about a magician in a crisis after losing his suitcase full of equipment on his way to perform a show in Moscow. I scanned the book titles on the walls over and over as she surrounded my writing with notes. “This is so cute!” she said aloud as she read. I gave a slight smile, relieved. When the student finished my piece, she expressed her feedback, telling me to make the magician’s mother a more relevant character. I revised my story based on the comments I received that evening, and now, three years later, I am immersed in the Creative Writing Department.

    As part of the workshop we led, my peers and I discussed teachers, homework, commitment, and details about the department. Afterwards, I reflected on the way I could easily ramble about Creative Writing, and how I did not hesitate to spend my Monday evening helping younger writers join this community that I have grown so fond of.

    The two prompts we gave as we taught the workshop were, “Write about an experience that changed you,” and “write about a meaningful friendship.” I considered how I’ve changed since eighth grade and how Creative Writing has played a big role. I thought about the perceptive lens I have learned to use when looking at writing and the world around me. I thought about the friends who bring so much joy and companionship to my life.

    -Nadja Goldberg, Class of 2021

  • For I am Possum, and Possum Isn’t Perfect by Emily Kozhina

    For I am Possum, and Possum Isn’t Perfect by Emily Kozhina

    I’m at a stage in my life where the most helpful thing for me to do is look to the future. With college applications due in just over a month, all my thoughts have been preoccupied with who I will be and what I will do, as if I’m supposed to have a clue. This stress seeps into my writing, as since the summer, I have found myself introspecting far deeper into my future, writing about the more gruesome and lonelier meanings of what it means to grow up, and eventually, to grow old. But it’s always good to think ahead, I’m told, so I try. 

    I’ve been a senior for just about two months now. 

    What I’ve learned so far are two things: 

    1. It’s much harder than you’d expect, and
    2. It’s not that bad.

    What senior year is, is that insatiable hunger to be the best. I need to be the best for colleges so they’re all crawling to me on their knees, begging me with full scholarships in their fists for me to accept their pleading offers. I need to be the best writer, with a published flash fiction collection under my belt, because after all, what would these past three years in Creative Writing have been for? I need to dedicate every moment of waking time to work, to write, to work on writing, and writing about future work, and only take a pause to breathe when I sleep.

    Obviously, this is unrealistic. I am sitting in my pajamas, avoiding eye-contact with my college to-do list and my writing revisions I have yet to make. I am drinking tea that tastes bitter because I left the bag in too long, my library books are long overdue, and I have yet to write back to my pen pal (Sorry, Esperanza). 

    Most days I find myself looking in the mirror and seeing a possum staring back at me, wearing my jeans and my sweater, taking too long to tie my boots. This isn’t me, this can’t be me! I want to think, but the possum looks back at me with a sad expression and confirms my fears. When will you come to accept me? It asks, tears whimpering at the corners of its tired eyes.

     I am possum, I have always been possum, and that’s fine. I’ve spent far too long expecting myself to be perfect, and getting frustrated when I am not. Possums are smart, mostly immune to rabies, and sometimes, in the right light, have a sort of glow coming off them from the bottom of the garbage bin. 

    I’m trying to get to know the possum in the mirror, and it turns out, she’s not that bad, after all.

    Emily Kozhina, Class of 2020

  • Response Poetry Unit by Leela Sriram

    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, which stressed me out a little bit because I didn’t have much confidence in what I wrote. As the school year has been progressing, my poetry has been improving slightly each time I write and compared to my summer work I believe I have improved drastically.

    Currently, Creative Writing is split into two classes, CW I (a class for the freshmen and sophomores) and CW II (a college-style seminar for the upperclassmen.) In CW I, we are learning about responding to poetry in our new unit, which I like to call our “Response Poetry unit.” Initially, I was a bit daunted by this idea of mimicking the form and style of other poems, mainly because I didn’t really know how to properly use certain literary devices, but after giving these “response poems” a try, I feel more confident in my ability to respond to poems and share out in class. One of my favorite things about our “Response Poetry unit” is that we have a lot of freedom regarding what we can write about, but the poems have to be in a certain format, such as four three-line stanzas and a couplet. So there is a lot to work with within the format, which gives some guidance.

    For our “Response Poetry unit,” we have been writing a poem a night, for our project where we make a book filled with all these poems. When first learning about this assignment, the making of a book filled with poetry that we have written in response to other poetry really interested me. Here is a poem I wrote and turned in for this unit, inspired by “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

    13 Different Ways of Looking at the Moon

    I

    Within darkness,

    The only thing disturbing

    The void, was the glow of the crescent moon

     

    II

    Wind blew idly by,

    As crevices

    Creeped up upon the surface

     

    III

    The Moon Lady is solitary, they say

    But she has the sun, for an eternity.

     

    IV

    The ocean bleeds onto sand

    As the First Quarter moon hovers, heavily

     

    V

    Seven hungry men

    Run through every crater

    Searching for

    The mythic moon cheese

     

    VI

    Sometimes,

    If you look close enough

    The moon

    Has three eyes

     

    VII

    The full moon

    Enchants the earth

    With its melted-silver glow

     

    VIII

    What is it like to be the moon

    To look out at a sea of stars,

    Yet the only thing sparkling is you

     

    IX

    In Between the trees

    And the waning gibbous moon

    Another twinkle appears

    But its just a plane

     

    X

    Maybe the moon’s

    Not just a fan of the dark

    But also enjoys time with the sun

     

    XI

    Drenched in rainwater,

    And the moon is still

    Shining

     

    XII

    A tear rolls down

    Its rocky crevised face

    But the tear never falls off the surface

     

    XIII

    We fly from coast to coast

    In a pitch black sky

    The waning crescent moon,

    Is always with us.

     

    -Leela Sriram, class of 2023