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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  • My First Brief Collection By Emma Eisler

    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 I started working on this collection, I realized I was actually writing two parallel collections, one about the stifling quiet of suburbia, and one about the isolated displacement of travel and being away. Because I could not stomach the idea of abandoning either of these trains of thought and exploration, I decided to combine the two collections into a larger series of two nucleus stories and six orbitals. Although this has added fairly significantly to my work load, I could not be more excited about continuing to work on this project.

    Not only am I working on my writing on the usual level of creating, I am also beginning to look at my writing through a larger lens that extends beyond the borders of any one story. Throughout my high school life, I have always had the sense that every piece of my writing has been steadily adding towards something bigger and greater than any of the individual pieces.

    Despite still being far from digging my fingernails into this something and holding onto it long enough to write it down, I can already feel how much closer this collection is bringing me. I have an individual voice and I am a writer, and this power extends beyond the last page of any single story.

    Emma Eisler, class of 2017

  • Sci-Fi Week by Killa Heredia Bratt

    Sci-Fi Week by Killa Heredia Bratt

    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 a little timid–it seemed like such a complex genre to step into. And who was I, someone who hardly ever reads or watches sci-fi, to write about it?

    Before this unit, I was not really introduced to this particular genre, save for the occasional post-­apocalyptic novel. And with the first assignment that Terry gave us, watching The Day the Earth Stood Still, (the original) it seemed I would be diving head first into it.

    The thing about that movie, is that amongst the spaceships and the robots and the aliens, the real meaning behind it is to be at peace. That war is a childish, immature thing. It is a thing of stupidity. And so even though with all the complex science, everything about it seemed to be straightforward and easy to understand.

    The real fun started when we all shared out our ideas to each other. There was a huge range between GMO freak accidents, (GMOcalypse!) and animal hybrids which drove some people to incest, and even selected memories being deleted from one’s mind to improve education. Everyone’s imagination just really came together to create these new worlds.

    And that’s when I realized there was absolutely no reason to be scared or apprehensive about writing sci-fi. It’s just a way to express your imagination, to deliver the message you want to get across just like you would any other story but with a twist. At least that’s what it is to me. I happen to love using my imagination. And with science fiction, you can do so much with it. So if you want to write stories about aliens or meteorites or even vampires whose to say you can’t?

    Killa Heredia Bratt, class of 2019

  • Reading Poetry by Isaac Schott-Rosenfield

    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 Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Plus I’d been reading novels back to back; Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast and A Farewell to Arms, and Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. The tangibility of the prosaic object assailed me on all sides. The poem was being subverted to the abstract slur which many of my peers maintain it is. It was too fanciful and too intellectual in turns.

    I was beginning to have doubts.

    Then my mother asked me to help her find a poem. I went to grab a book of poetry, and looking at the bookshelf, got distracted with the titles and authors that jumped out at me. I made a stack of books I’d read, and grabbed a few I hadn’t, looking for the poem. I brought a few books—Unattainable Earth by Czeslaw Milosz, The Simple Truth by Philip Levine, a book of Merwin, a book of Ferlinghetti, and a copy of The Bhagavad Gita—to bed, and then to school the next morning.. In a couple days I wrote a poem, unbidden.

    It hadn’t left.

    I am always scared poetry has left me. That I won’t like it anymore, that I won’t be able to write it, that no one but a poet would ever read it. It turns into a blank word document and retreats up in to the air.

    But only for a while.

    Isaac Schott-Rosenfield, class of 2017

  • Stereotypes by Stella Pfahler

    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 predispositions come from other departments—Creative Writing is sometimes thought of as a cult-like department; that all we do is sit in a dark room and write until our legs grow pasty and our muscles grow withered, weak from disuse. Of course, the majority of other students call us these things playfully—any department-versus-department strife in my experience is purely bravado.

    I find the Creative Writing department to be more diverse then I ever could have imagined while applying. Coming into this department as a serious athlete, I was worried that I would grow to fit CW stereotypes—that I would grow soft and become as wary of the sun as a vampire. Some of my friends from middle school decided not to apply just because of the lack of sports teams. And, though it’s true that us Creative Writers can’t participate in school sports due to department rules (as many SOTA students play for Academy of Arts and Sciences), many of us find the time to become things…other than writers. Creative Writing is home to actresses, dancers, parkour experts (ahem), musicians, gymnasts. Most of my friends in the department agree that, in order to become a true artist, you have to be as well-rounded as fits your ability—that you have to try out other mediums, become immersed in SF’s art community, get out of your comfort zone. It is my belief that Creative Writing is the most accepting and varied department, in terms of character—in the entire school. I am proud to be part of it.

    Stella Pfahler, class of 2019

  • A Common Lesson in Absurdity by Thalia Rose

    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 tell you a story about the ant who survived the apocalypse.”

    “There was an ant named Todd. He was five feet tall and stood like a human man. He could only travel by killing. After killing, he would travel in the carcass of his victim. He did not feel bad about it. He saw a rabbit in the grass. He ran up to it and dug his fangs into her stomach.”

    The kids around me were laughing. One kid had his finger so deep into his nose that I could only see the knuckle of it. I remember having a confusion as deeply rooted as that kid’s finger. My consular whispered to the co-consular, “This story is four hours long.”

    It did. I will spare you the length of the story. The progression of events went like this: the ant travels in the body of the rabbit until he reaches a pelican. Upon reaching the pelican, he kills it. He flies around and has a revelation about Holiness. Then, he kills a fish. He, as a fish, travels to a playground. The story ends with the fish, who is actually an ant sitting in a rotting corpse, sitting on the playground as the last creature alive after the apocalypse. There was no particular moral to this story. It was reliant on shock value, and after about an hour the audience had been drained of shock value.

    I think about this story often for two reasons. Firstly because, as a writer who prefers to create poetry and prose, form is highly experimental. The storytelling at church camp was resonant in the way that someone had devoted time to creating a four hour long story about a murderous ant and that proved that if an individual is determined to do something, be it abstract to the point where it is appalling or not, an individual can do it. Secondly, it was memorable because it was an odd, inconsequential storytelling that ultimately holds no significance to my life and personal choices beyond a common lesson in absurdity.

    Thalia Rose, class of 2018

  • Halloween by Noa Mendoza

    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 cotton candy. While I went into the dance with the entirely wrong attitude (“this is gonna be lame” I’d grumbled, sinking into my chair and pulling my hood over my eyes), I ended up discovering something entirely surprising–dances are kind of… fun.

    Sure, they’re lame. Sure, it was just a bunch of Freshman gyrating to pop music,

    but, halfway through a Pitbull song, I had some sort of epiphany: if I had to be there, I might as well enjoy myself. So, I threw some coats in the back and, along with Josie Weidner (’16), went and danced the night away. This, I realized, is something that applies to being a writer as well. There have always been prompts that I didn’t like, that felt completely ridiculous, or times when I thought I absolutely can’t write this play or poetry is so stupid, what’s the point—but, like chaperoning a Halloween Dance, sometimes it’s good to push yourself. To get out of your comfort zone and write that weird conceptual poem or do the cha cha slide. And it was if you just “go with the flow” (in the words of Josie Weidner ’16, someone I only kind of know), you might just **gasp** enjoy yourself.

    Noa Mendoza, class of 2016

  • On Cockney Rhyming Slang by Liam Miyar-Mullan

    On Cockney Rhyming Slang by Liam Miyar-Mullan

    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 with the tradition of Cockney rhyming slang. It’s hard to imagine that this impressively tricky, poetic colloquialism could exist in such a brutally rough culture, but perhaps that is why it exists. It is a secret language. Something that identifies outsider from insider. Something that unifies people. Rhyming slang is the replacement of words with a phrase that rhymes with the word replaced, and it is, well, genius.

    The following is a scene in which I have tried to write as many rhyming slang words into the conversation:

    THE POKER GAME

    TOMMY: Y’know, I heard Maria and Johnny aren’t getting along… her bacon and eggs (legs) are so sexy!

    (Deals some cards.)

    JACK: You’re yanking my cobbler’s awls (balls), mate!

    TOMMY: Pass the army and navy (gravy), would ya’?

    (JACK slides a tin of gravy down to TOMMY.)

    JACK: Have ya’ seen Maria’s Bristol cities (titties)? I’d wait out their little marriage just for those!

    TOMMY: Mate! So you Adam an’ Eve (believe) me ‘en?
    (TOMMY starts chowing down on his potatoes and gravy.)
    She’d make a hell-of-a-fine trouble and strife (wife).

    JACK: She’s mine ya’ old Hampton wick (prick)!
    (JACK shows TOMMY his cards. JACK wins.)
    Ha-Ha ya’ old raspberry tart (fart).

    TOMMY: Ya’ must be cheating! I always win! What are you hiding? Let me have a little butcher’s hook (look).

    (TOMMY tries to swing around the table to see JACK’S cards but JACK turns his back to him.)

    JACK: Yeah right! I beat you fair and square. If you try to peak again you’ll wind up like ole Jim.

    TOMMY: What happened to ole Jim?

    (TOMMY starts eating his potatoes again.)

    JACK: Ya’ didn’t hear? He’s brown bread (dead), mate.

    (TOMMY spits potatoes back into bowl dramatically.)

    TOMMY: What??!! The poor guy! How’d he die??!!

    JACK: Fell down the old apples and pears (stairs) on his way down for dinner.

    TOMMY: The poor fellow. Must have broken his neck or something.

    (TOMMY returns to eating his potatoes. JACK shows his cards. JACK wins.)

    JACK: Ha-Ha! Ten for ten!

    TOMMY: Ya’ stupid, ignorant little push in the truck.

    (PS, forgive the image of Dick Van Dyke, an American actor pretending to be a Cockney chim-chim-cheree chimney sweep…)

    Liam Miyar-Mullan, class of 2018

  • Rehearsal Week by Emma Bernstein

    We’re in the SOTA theater, sprawled out over the seats with the house-lights on. Somebody reads their piece on stage. Heather and Isaiah give feedback. I fidget, stare up at the blinding overhead lights. Tuck my hair behind my ear. Untuck it. Wiggle my toes and refocus my attention on the stage. Someone (anyone) is reading and I’ve heard their piece enough times already that I know what they’re going to say a second before they say it. I think about my own piece, look down at the crumpled paper in my lap, at the words that have begun to lose meaning with all the times I’ve said them. 

    This is rehearsal week. It’s long, mundane, and exhausting no matter how much coffee I drink, but I am aware, even as I drift off and am jolted awake again by a crash backstage, of how precious this time is to me. I will remember this rehearsal week as I remember all others before it, as the kind of anxious monotony that is enjoyable only when it’s over, and when Friday rolls around and we go on stage to share our work with friends and family, I know I will be excited as I was my Freshman year of high school. 

    Emma Berenstein, class of 2017

  • Deadlines… by Josie Weidner

    You guys, let’s talk about deadlines. I’ve never been the type of person who meets every deadline—case in point, this blog post is a day late—but sometimes I just have more pressing matters, like watching the entire third season of Game of Thrones in one night, or staring at my ceiling as I think about the things I should be doing. I think everyone can relate to that feeling at the end of the day, when your back muscles ache from the weight of that fifteen-pound sack you’ve been slugging around, and its full of all of these papers just waiting to be studied but all you want to do is crawl into bed with a cup of tea and find out what perils the Stark family face next.

    This feeling is called procrastination, and I’m kind of an expert. You’d think after four years of high school, I would have mastered the balance between finishing homework and still being able to enjoy life outside of school (aka, meeting deadlines). However, as senior year as progressed, I’ve only come to realize that enjoying life outside of school is so much more fun than…well, school. And college applications. And the SAT.  And thinking about next year. Because, lets be honest, not thinking about it is so much easier than thinking about it.

    What is a deadline? It’s just a word, given the power to cause stress and anxiety, it makes people snap and succumb to pressure. Deadlines are a construct of society, completely pulled from thin air by the modern man.

    It turns out though, being able to meet deadlines is a crucial element to being a writer.  And a member of civilization. Authors need to meet their publisher’s deadlines, and their own personal deadlines, or books would never be written. Deadlines are what make us productive, and they keep order in work and in life.

    So I guess, I have to cooperate with deadlines. Maybe I’ll actually write a blog post on time. Maybe I’ll stop obsessing over how boss Khaleesi is with her dragons, and actually start doing work. Just one more episode…

    Josie Weidner, class of 2016

  • hometown of harlem by Isi Vasquez

    hometown of harlem

    all of us, haulin and singin and spillin juice. mister charlie
    is a-comin, and we all gotta run, but not ’til we get what’s due. the reefers  are droppin
    the stomp of our feet
    the ofay don’t deal in coal,

    but we do.

    we’re all in west hell, deep below, sell out
    dressed in our righteous rags, draped down.
    collar a nod, hear our words
    we’re aunt hagar’s kids, we’re just like you.

    all these frail eels, and i, coal scuttle blond, all of us smokin

    each other.

    and all these jar heads tryin to catch our attention, but all the girls are here
    for each other.
    the old cuffee girls, with the gut-bucket beat, stayin here long after the song is done.
    don’t want to go home to thousand on a plate and the bear.

    young suits, but lovely faces.

    the big apple ain’t been good to us, but we made our way here.

    —————————————————————————————

    One of the most interesting things about writing poetry, for me, is how you just end up with so many words that you had no idea were used. This poem was an assignment for my LGBTQ + studies class. We were supposed to write about the Harlem renaissance using language from then. The writing process of this piece was really interesting! I had to learn a lot of language, and look up how to use it. I watched videos on what slang people used and put together a list of phrases that I liked best. It was really interesting and a completely new experience for me, writing a piece with language that I wasn’t that familiar with. The process of putting this all together was a really incredible experience, and really interesting. Language is such a fun, lovely thing.