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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  • Talking About Reading by Colin Yap

    As a kid, I harbored a secret belief that the way I read was much, much different than the way anybody else read. It wasn’t driven by a superiority complex—I just didn’t understand why people talked about books the way they did. Admittedly, I had no better solution for the problem of how stories should be discussed. I adopted the personal policy that talking about stories ruins them, and that was it for me. Nobody had the right to muck up the pipeline between the individual writer and the individual reader.

    Growing as both a writer and reader in the Creative Writing Department has forced me to confront this prejudice. The principal exercise of the department is deconstruction: the dismantling and analysis of the working parts of poems, stories, and plays. No sentence is left untouched, and no theme unnoticed in our discussions. While for most of my young life I thought of this act as poisonous, I’ve come to realize the value in a shared understanding. The more I talk about words and stories, the more I understand them, in a way that is wonderfully separate from myself. There was no big event that spurred this change, just a gradual willingness to step outside of my singular interpretation, and appreciate the hundreds of different ways a piece could be read. In this way, I began to understand the miracle of the word “I,” in fiction and in life, with its innumerable owners.

    Being a part of Creative Writing means being a part of a community that values the intentionality of words above all else. It means being a part of a group of people who cares about writers: about Eliot, Hemingway, Murakami. But most of all, we care about each other, and the work each of us is producing. We critique and compliment and push one another. I think my younger self underestimated the idea of conversation surrounding stories. I maintain the belief that I read and write in a much different way than everybody else. However, it’s not a phenomenon that’s exclusive to me. For all of my high school years, I’ve been able to surround myself with people who love words as much I do. They’ve shown me how much I love to debate, to talk endlessly about stories, and made me a believer in a community of lovers of language. 

    Colin Yap, class of 2016

  • How To Embody Wanderlust by Charlotte Pocock

    1. Go weeks without sleep listening to the same song on repeat. Watch the moon from your window, frown at the lack of stars. Tell yourself you’ll never get tired of looking at the sky. Get tired of looking at the sky. Climb out of your window like an escaping thief to watch the sunrise. End up scaring a large dog across the street.
    2. Invest in too many maps and too many pins. Pin the places you want to go in white and the places you have been in red. Congratulations, your white to color ratio is now equal to the U.S. Congress. Get angry. Take down the map.
    3. Create a five-page list of the places you want to go. Loose the list. You temporarily give up hope. I mean, you don’t even have a job.
    4. Try for months to capture this feeling, this constant reminder that you are here and not everywhere else. Fail.
    5. Create a tumblr tag titled “places”. Fill it with pictures of great cities and not-so-great landscapes. Spend three hours scrolling through the “Prague” tag.
    6. Receive money from your grandparents for your birthday. Tell your grandmother you’re going to run away to Prague. She won’t believe you. You don’t believe you. What are you even going to do in Prague?
    7. Watch others explain that they often write about the experiences they’re not having and the frustration it ensues. Repress the urge to stand up and scream YESYESYES at the top of your lungs.
    8. Download a bus route app on your phone. Find out that you can get to Seattle in twenty-three hours and eleven minutes. Get off at the bus stop and stare at the train for five minutes. Go home.
    9. Tell your friend about the Seattle incident. They don’t believe you. You don’t believe you. What are you even going to do in Seattle?
    10. Accept that you’re going to be stuck for a couple years. You’re going to be stuck your entire life. But maybe, one day, you’ll be stuck somewhere else.

      Charlotte Pocock, class of 2019

  • Stories Are Everywhere by Lena Hartsough

    I see stories everywhere. In every face I examine, in every short phrase I overhear, and in every label or sign I read.

    For instance, one day I was at my friend’s house with her and another friend. We were finishing her enormous carton of Odwalla®, and I noticed that on the back of the carton it said, “Separation is natural – shake it up!®” For some reason, I found this hilarious. I pointed it out to my friend, while our host sorted records on the floor, and she laughed too. We thought up scenarios for the phrase, including quite a few puberty classes. She thought that it would be the puberty teacher telling students that it’s natural for boys and girls to grow apart as they grow older, and I said it was a world where humans are born without a butt crack, and the separation spoken of is when the buttocks separate from one into two.

    I think the reason we attributed the simple sentence to a puberty class was because it seemed a bit condescending. The exclamation point made it sound like an overexcited teacher when we read it out loud.

    Although that situation was comedic, this penchant of mine for seeing stories has often helped me find inspiration for my writing. Many of my ideas for pieces to write come from songs or smaller stories that I find. In fact, as I write this post, I quickly type down another idea onto my list of story inspirations. It came from a song I just heard.

    Lena Hartsough, class of 2019

  • Poetry? by Julieta Roll

    In Creative Writing we are currently in our Poetry Unit. This means that at the beginning of art CW 2 (seniors and juniors) and CW 1 (sophomores and freshman) split and go into their own classes to study and learn about the broad exhilarating topic of poetry. I am in CW 1, I’m a freshman, and I have to say at first I had my doubts about poetry. I never thought I was any good at it, and found writing a poem stressful, like I had to make each line fit in it’s exact place so it sounded right. In the CW 1 Unit we’ve been analyzing mountains of poetry, and I’ve discovered and read so many poets I’d never even heard of. I feel I’ve been opened up, and I’ve been quite enjoying sitting down every night and writing a poem. I think it’s because I’ve found that poetry is freedom to me. I can write whatever I want and it feels personal and contains a lot of meaning. It’s like my own little seashell. When people would ask if I liked to write poetry or fiction better my response would always be ‘fiction’ no doubt about it, but now I’m rethinking. I know I still have a lot to learn about writing and I feel I shouldn’t rope myself to one type of writing or the other just yet but it was interesting to me to how easily I sunk into poetry. We’ll just have to see what happens.

    Julieta Roll, class of 2019

  • A Discussion on Sappho and Commas by Ren Weber

    A Discussion on Sappho and Commas by Ren Weber

    Today the entirety of Creative Writing had a long and passionate conversation about the American school grading system (and the problems that entail). Then, with only forty minutes of class left, CWII left with Maia and the rest of us remained with Heather. She told us a story about rediscovering a book with Sappho poetry, and thus we began the reading.

    First we read the foreword that included this Latin phrase: “Non omnis moriar, magnaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam.” With the power of the blessed Internet and temperamental school wifi we learned that this meant, “Not all die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.”

    Something quite a bit of us realized early on about Sappho’s poetry is that each one is about 3-4 lines (at least, the poems we read). Another thing I found interesting about the process of annotating and discussing short poems, though, is that they held incredible amount of things to talk about in those short lines. Her poetry writing felt (in Heather’s words): “Sweet, sensual, luxurious.”

    Then the topic came to the line in Sappho’s poem “Standing by my bed,” and it goes: “In gold sandals / Dawn that very / moment awoke me.” With short poems like this, there were so many different ways to understand it. Is the narrator waking up standing by the bed? Does the narrator sleepwalk? Is it Dawn standing by the bed? Is the poet personifying the Dawn?

    Eventually we came to one understanding of the poem as Dawn wearing gold sandals, standing by a bed. Then we thought about how there could be a comma between “Dawn” and “that”. Upon remembering that these poems were written in (if I recall correctly) 3 BC, we asked ourselves: Were there even commas back then?

    With another round of research we learned that commas didn’t exist at that time. Later we realized that commas could be found in other poems in the same collection, and those were simply the result of the poems’ translation.
    Only two days in the Poetry Unit, days and lessons like these make me feel very excited for what is to come.

    Ren Weber, class of 2019

  • Remedial Spanish with Junot Díaz by Sophie Mazoschek

    Thanks to three years of high school classes, I’ve developed a mild dislike of Spanish. I still think it’s a beautiful language, especially when spoken out loud, but it’s become synonymous in my mind with the perpetual and formulaic boredom of school. Every assignment we ever get seems to ask for the same thing: List five subjunctive triggers. Translate this paragraph about buying grapes. Conjugate this verb into this tense. And so on. As I result I sometimes zone out in class and miss chunks of new material.

    If I flew to Spain tomorrow I might be able to ask such philosophical questions as: “Where is the hotel?” or “How much does this fish cost?”. I could talk about when to use the indicative tense vs. the subjunctive, or rattle off a list of impersonal expressions. Pero yo no puedo decir nada importante.

    Yesterday I picked up a book of short stories by Dominican American writer Junot Díaz entitled “This Is How You Lose Her”. As of now I’m about halfway through and what’s struck me the most, even more than Díaz’s brazen, poetic voice, are the fragments of Spanish phrases and slang (some of them pretty dirty) that are peppered throughout the book. While some words can be figured out through context clues, Google Translate or spanishdict.com is usually necessary to wade through particularly dense sections. These occur when characters converse with one another, slipping seamlessly between two languages, and when Yunior, Díaz’s womanizing narrator, describes his various girlfriends or sucias (side chicks). The girls always have some defining adjective or carefully thought out term of endearment attached to their names: flaca, hermosa, prieta, guapisima. Indiecita o Dominicana o Blanquita. To understand these characters you have to research the definitions of these words as well as their possible subtexts, to understand why Yunior would assign each one to each particular girl. Junot Díaz is inadvertently teaching me more Spanish than I’ve learned in the past six months.

    I can’t tell you exactly why This Is How You Lose Her” has changed my attitude so drastically in less than 24 hours. Maybe it’s because of the intense and palpable tenderness Díaz feels for his characters and for his own Dominican heritage, which breathes life back into words and phrases I’d previously only seen in emotionless textbook paragraphs. Maybe it’s the fact that his multilingual writing captures a depth and richness of culture that’s rarely present in plain English prose. Or maybe I just needed a break from classrooms and repetitive homework assignments.

    I’d highly recommend “This Is How You Lose Her,” to anyone with an interest in languages or excellent short stories, no matter what your native tongue is. Also, please pay attention in Spanish class.

    Sophie Mazoschek, class of 2016

  • On Reading Female Authors: Or, How I Learned to Love the 21 st Century by Emma Eisler

    On Reading Female Authors: Or, How I Learned to Love the 21 st Century by Emma Eisler

    As many people reading this may know, I spent the first two years of my high school experience reading a lot, and I do mean a lot, of dead male authors. This began with my heady and emotionally tumultuous reading of On the Road in the middle of freshman year and continued on with shorter and slightly less passionate love affairs with Hunter S. Thompson, Henry Miller, Hemingway, and a host of other narcissists who many of us know and, rightfully, adore. This is not to say that I never read books by women or that I was intentionally avoiding leading a more varied literary life, but, if we’re being honest, a large percentage of my reading did fit into that category.

    Then I started junior year and realized I needed, badly, to expand my horizons and, maybe even more importantly, become a little less obsessed with past decades or movements I’d missed and a little more obsessed with all the great books being written right now and all the potential energy of this decade. And so I read Karen Russell. And then I read Miranda July. And then I read Maria Semple. And then I read Aimee Bender. And then I read Marina Keegan. And, most importantly, I read Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. And it changed everything. Here was this woman who I’d never before met writing down pretty much my exact manifesto on how I want to live—always remembering to be grateful for and to fully inhabit every day and every moment. This, I think, was the moment I became a modern girl, and by that I don’t mean that I suddenly relinquished my cape of nostalgia or downloaded a snap-chat. What I mean is, after sixteen years of trying to travel backwards in time with a respectable degree of success, I started wanting, not to go forwards even, but to exist and make the most of exactly where I am. Right now.

    Emma Eisler, class of 2017

  • History In Depth by Angelica LaMarca

    This week in Creative Writing 1, the sophomores have been leading poetry discussions. A few weeks ago, each one of us was assigned a chapter from the book Poems of The Millennium by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, along with a poem (within our dedicated chapter) to really go in depth on. The chapter I was assigned was entitled “Neo-Avanguardia.” Harmony’s was “The Misty Poets,” Kayne’s was “Concrete Poetry,” Rose’s was “Postwar Japanese Poets,” Isi’s was “Oral Poets,” Anna’s was “The Tamuzi Poets,” and Liam’s was “The Cobra Group.” These were assigned to us based on our acute interests and writing styles. I think that not only has this assignment helped us develop basic poetic skills, but it has also highlighted the importance of context by having us analyze a poem as well as the literary movement that fueled it. For example, Harmony’s poem, entitled “The Crocodile” by Yang Lian, would have induced completely different interpretations if we hadn’t known it was written during the Chinese Communist Revolution. Being a sophomore in world history, it’s been fun learning more about literary history and how it connects with what we are learning in class. Similarly, in my English class we’ve been learning about Dada, cubism, and other art scenes that characterized modern art. As someone who goes to SoTA it’s been truly enriching to learn to comprehend art history as more of a “web” rather than the stream of spontaneous, isolated events that, in my experience, we are often taught in school.

    Angelica LaMarca, class of 2018

  • Salable Stories by Isaac Schott-Rosenfield

    “[Fitzgerald] had told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into salable magazine stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoring. He said it was whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books. I said that I did not believe anyone could write any way except the very best he could write without destroying his talent. Since he wrote the real story first, he said, the destruction and changing of it that he did at the end did him no harm.”

    -Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

    Hemingway was still appalled, even years later when he wrote down the exchange in A Moveable Feast. As for me, I don’t know what to think. I know that all three of us agree that the thing must be written, and written in its entirety. Nothing can be intentionally left out: it won’t stay away; the work will not complete. But could I really cut it out at the end? Could I ruin the thing I’ve created? I don’t mean to imply that my own work operates at the level of either of the two literary giants, but its completion in my own eyes would be the object of destruction. Others might like it more—they might not even consider it selling out—but I’d know.

    These thoughts come to me as I contemplate the assignments I’ve been given. One is the run-of-the-mill, “write a ‘memoir’ which extrapolates a moment from your life and then reflects on it.” It calls for the basic plodding thought process that many English classes aspire towards: an unnecessarily didactic narrative with an “engaging hook,” and too many “describing adjectives” (to use a redundant term). However my English teacher has been generous in allowing me to take to an unconventional formatting: I’m modeling my “memoir” based on a format implemented by Rumi (a Persian poet of the thirteenth century), where a semi-prosaic section sets up and introduces a conceit, to be maintained and explored by a series of long and short form poems. I am excited by the prospect. I like the artistic and intellectual freedom offered. But there are limits, and this scares me. It scares me because, in this long form artistic attempt, I might run across something that was real art. And could I set that down, were it to conflict with the obvious moral-reflective narrative I’ve been asked to construct?

    The second assignment is this blog post. Before I sat down to write this, I spent over an hour creating a piece of philosophy that I believe to be true, and that I was proud of in craft and in thought… And it was utterly unpublishable. It was too hard-worded; too uncompromising. It went against the wishes of my audience. It did not fit the assignment. I finished writing it. I said to myself, Emerson wrote “Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again.”

    And then I sat down to write this.

    Isaac Schott-Rosenfield, class of 2017

  • Cry Baby by Killa Heredia Bratt

    Cry Baby by Killa Heredia Bratt

    I’ve never been one to hide my emotions. In fact, I find my emotions in particular to be very strong. I don’t like hiding them. I think that it’s really important to know how you feel and to share how you feel with other people if you need to. With that being said, there are several things that make me cry. I am a huge cry baby. I’ve cried over The Pursuit of Happyness trailer. Hell, watching Kung Fu Panda 2 makes me cry. It’s because tears produce in response to a strong emotion you may experience from stress, pleasure, anger, sadness and suffering to indeed, physical pain.

    My most favorite fiction books have made me cry. And even for me, the huge crybaby, it’s hard for me tear up over literature. But that’s how I know they’re true, genuine pieces of art. I mean, think about it. It means the author has done their job hasn’t it? You’re invested in their stories, you’re moving in sync with the characters. It’s writing that can totally captivate you, something so powerful it causes you to feel from something deeper. Something so impressive, it physically evokes something out of you. I crave powerful writing, I crave something that connects with me on a human, emotional level.

    That’s definitely one of my goals as a writer. I want the reader to be invested in my story, to start having feelings toward the characters like they would other human beings. Someday, I want someone to cry because they’ve read my writing.

    Also, here are some songs to cry to:

    • Let It Fall – Lykke Li
    • Idfc – Blackbear
    • Trouble – Coldplay
    • Black Beauty – Lana Del Rey
    • Porcelain – Red Hot Chili Peppers
    • Anything by Adele
    • Dia De Enero – Shakira
    • All Falls Down – Kanye West
    • Anything from Ed Sheeran’s “+”
    • album Between The Bars – Elliot Smith