good children, they clean-up after they play…
colin is all over it
can you identify these shoes?
practice for kirby cove
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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If you missed the Poetry Cafe last weekend, you can still read the works in the chapbook!
Simply visit SOTASHOP to buy your copy. It’s the next best thing to being there.
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What is there to look forward to in the Poetry Café this Friday and Saturday @ 7:30? Well. . .
– Feminine energy flowing from the stage, and not the awkward, intense, liberal, all talk “equal rights” feminism, but a celebration of what femininity means to all of us.
– The last Poetry Cafe of the senior girls of CW!
– Amazing poetry in amazing places, written and read aloud by an amazing community of writers!
– All the intensity, personality, energy, dark hushed rooms, and intimacy of a poetry reading.
– Two experiences completely like and unlike each other, each featuring different poetry written by the same people.
Come to the Creative Writing Show(s) this weekend!
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After a brief hiatus, we are rebuilding our Facebook page. So come on over, like us, post a poem on our wall, or whatever…
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Anyone I’ve known who has ever attended the CSSSA program has LOVED it. Just loved it. I was talking to a SOTA parent whose daughter attended the Films Studies program and he said that she was so ecstatic about the experience that she didn’t want to return a second summer because she didn’t want to tarnish her perfect memory. Another student I knew was having one of those infamous “Sophomore Boy Syndrome” years where his grades dropped, he missed tons of school, and just didn’t seem to care much about anything. Somehow, though, he made it into the program (he does have extraordinary talent). He returned energized and had a stellar Junior Year.
CSSSA stands for California State Summer School for the Arts, located in Valencia California (where awesomeness lives). It’s a competitive pre-college program that offers a full-range of arts programming, including Creative Writing. The application deadline is February 28th.
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One of the most popular, well-attended events of the year at SOTA is Media Night. If you missed the show last night, it’s not too late. Arrive early as it often sells-out. See SOTA students from a variety of disciplines up on the big screen at the Dan Kryston Memorial Theatre.
Media DepartmentMedia Night
Dan Kryston Memorial Theater
Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the ArtsThursday, Jan 17, 2013 at 7:30 PM; Friday, Jan 18, 2013 at 7:30 PMAdults: $15; Students/Seniors: $7
The latest offerings in narrative, experimental, and documentary film from the students of SOTA’s Media Department -
One of the earliest units Creative Writing delved into this semester was an “art unit” taught by Ronald Chase, where he helped us understand the changing landscape, subject, and techniques of art, and taught us ways in which we communicate about art. Why use, “I just don’t like it very much,” when you can go much deeper into the composition and specify? “This blank canvas may attempt to communicate a blank and slightly saturated view of what art has fallen into, but fails because it is, in effect, a blank canvas.”
The unit concluded with an essay contest in which we were to enter: the 2012 Tarkovsky Essay Contest, involving a short essay on any of the Art & Film movies we had seen and wanted to write about. The lucky winners were: Abigail Schott-Rosenfield, 11th grade, Tarkovsky Prize winner; Frances Saux, 11th grade, 2nd Place; Midori Chen, 11th Grade, 3rd Place; and Bailey Lewis Van, 10th Grade, runner-up.
A link to all of their essays can be found here. Congrats to the winners and all other C-Dubs who entered!
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by Hosanna (’14)
The thing no one wants to be is a lone wolf. When do we ever hear about a wolf not belonging to a pack? Who’s the wolf supposed to hunt with? Who’s the wolf supposed to howl at the moon with, chase down white rabbits with, scare off predators with? It is all about being comfortable with yourself. It is all about being able to be alone. Being by yourself doesn’t necessarily mean running away from home to live in a crack-infested forest. Nor does it mean hiding in dark, moist, potato-growing closet corners reading a book you can barely see. I feel being alone is being able to walk down the street, see some annoyingly social kid from your school, and not wanting to find a stranger to talk to. It is being able to sit on the ground while waiting for a bus. It is being able to hear yourself cry and then laugh at yourself. It is being able to heal yourself. I’ve been a lone wolf since the beginning of time. The reason I started writing was because I felt left out. In elementary school I would listen to Amy Winehouse, type until I had to do homework, and read. Now, I’m plugged up, listening to Tupac, crying when I get too frustrated to deal with anyone, singing when a song is too good to be silent. If Chuck Norris can be a lone wolf and still sit in the corner of a circular room, why can’t anyone else? If you can’t deal with yourself, how can you deal with anyone else?
True stories. -
by Abigail (’14)
On December 16, Mykel, Midori and I went to a reading from Carville Annex. It was held in the Arboretum, in the redwood grove, which is difficult to find. I showed up early at the entrance and met some of the readers. None of them were sure about how to get to the redwoods. “We were hoping Sarah knew.”
Sarah Fontaine showed up. “Hey, where are we going?” we asked her. “Well…I don’t really know,” she said. So we started wandering. I noticed a sign that said, “Redwood Grove,” with an arrow, but nobody else seemed to. I was walking behind them, and they were too far away for me to mention it… Since they had they the map, I figured they knew what they were doing. Not really, but whatever. Someone said, “Even if nobody figures out where the reading is, they’ll have a great time walking around with the plants!”
“Yeah!”
“This place is rad, right? I love the weather!”
“Yeah!”
The entire reading had, in some ways, the tone of this conversation. Everybody was happy to be there, and everybody liked and trusted everybody else. The readers were all young—two were high school students, the rest were maybe twenty to twenty-eight. Many of the pieces were about not knowing how to be a good adult, or not knowing what the author’s place in the world was, but the readers were figuring it out… they were getting there. They were enjoying themselves along the way.
the halcyon bird, or Kingfisher One of the pieces, a “sermon” for the holidays—“’Tis the goddamn season,” it began—explained (convincingly and hilariously) the importance of paying attention to one thing at a time. Apparently, “the ancients” believed that, for a few days during the holiday season, birds called Halcyons floated in nests on the sea, keeping it calm so people could celebrate. The author said that, this year, she’d celebrate the season by not multitasking— she’d try to live some halcyon days.
Her fellow readers seemed to be living halcyon days, too. They were all calm and appreciative and earnest and fully present. Which you don’t get often at your average reading.
It was nice to hear my friend Annakai read (I hadn’t in a long time) and it was also nice to sit with Midori and Mykel, listening, in such a pretty spot. Birds kept popping out of the surrounding bushes, flying past the readers’ faces, then disappearing again. There were more great things about it, but it would make a very long blog post to talk about them all. Midori said it was the best reading she had ever gone to, and Mykel and I agree, so keep an eye out for more.
The title of the reading was “What a Few People Want to Say to the World.” I wish I could quote the first piece read, which was Sarah’s, but the gist of it seemed to be that self-promotion is only gross when it’s egotistical—when it’s just because you want to tell people about yourself, it’s helpful, and bigger than yourself, and necessary. The readers were all happy to be included in the “few people,” and they were confident that they were talking to a larger audience than just the people in the redwood clearing.
