For all auditioning students, here’s a video that (hopefully) sheds some light on what to expect on The Day. We are having slight issues with posting the video on Tumblr, but as soon as we figure it out, we’ll link it here.
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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Friday 17: Cine/Club: Randall Museum Jean Pierre Melville’s THE ARMY OF SHADOWS (1995, France)
Another film that fills you in on some of the fascinating events of WWII that may not be covered in your social studies class. In this case, the French Resistance: a group of unusual French citizens working to sabotage the Nazis any way they can in occupied France. Unfortunately, the Nazis are slowly reducing their numbers. Who is giving them away to the enemy? Could it be one of their own?
WHY WE CHOSE THIS FILM: The Army of Shadows gives you a tremendous context in which to place your knowledge of WWII. Lots of ordinary citizens gave their lives to resist the Nazis, and the group of people in the film come from real life. The film acts like a thriller, but also is filled with carefully etched personalities, and a great suspenseful plot. All the major people in the film lived through these events, so they can nautrually bring them vividly to life. You’ll be on the edge of your seats.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR: Jean Pierre Melville adopted the last name of his favorite writer, Herman Melville (Moby Dick). Much of his life follows the same unsual pattern. During WW II he worked in the French Resistance against the Nazis. Refused in his attempts to work in film, he decided to make his own films with his own money, and eventually owned his own studio. His friendship with Godard (another film maker associated with the French “new wave”) led to his habit of filming on location—but his fondness for America gangster films can be found in all his early films—the weapons,coats, fedoras dot many of his “film noirs” like Le Samurai and Le Circle Rouge. He is not very well known in the U.S.
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Saturday February 18, 2012
7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Bird & Beckett Books and Records
653 Cheney St.
San Francisco
(415) 586-3733
GIRLCHILD
Join debut novelist Tupelo Hassman
for a book launch party, with live music
“Life is a crazy risk, a foolish venture, a journey hardly worth attempting by poor daughters raised by poor daughters who have no maps or guidebooks (and no teeth, either), who receive no justice
that doesn’t hurt about the same as the injustice it means to remedy. This story is your worst white nightmare. Tupelo Hassman’s GIRLCHILD is a triumph and a philosophical treatise on survival.”-Reba
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Sat. Feb. 18, 2012 ~ 12:30 pm
Sun. Feb. 19, 2012 – 5:00 pm
Roxie Theater
3117 16th Street
San Francisco
(415)863-1087San Francisco Premiere –
San Francisco Independent Film Festival
Deaf Jam
This highly acclaimed doc follows deaf teen,
Aneta Brodski, an Israeli immigrant, who attends
a school for the Deaf in Queens and inhabits the
exuberant world of American Sign Language (ASL)
poetry. As her artistry evolves within her ASL poetry group,
she decides to compete in a spoken word poetry slam.
Filmmaker Judy Lieff chronicles her bold entry into
Manhattan’s spoken-word slam scene, where she meets
Tahani, a hearing Palestinian- American slam poet.
Deaf Jam Trailer-Reba
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Support SOTA and come to our production of The Producers!
Shows:- February 23 at 7:30
- February 24 at 7:30
- February 25 at 2 and 7:30
- March 2 at 7:30
- March 3 at 7:30
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For everyone who owes Julie $10 for the t-shirt we got during Poetry Cafe, please bring them to either Giorgia or Heather tomorrow!
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The Book of A Thousand Eyes by Lyn Hejinian
Written over the course of two decades, The Book of a Thousand Eyes was begun as an homage to Scheherazade, the heroine of The Arabian Nightswho, through her nightly tale-telling, saved her culture and her own life by teaching a powerful and murderous ruler to abandon cruelty in favor of wisdom and benevolence. Hejinian’s book is a compendium of “night works”—lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day’s end some of the day’s events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise The Book of a Thousand Eyes argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life.
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator. She is the author of several books of poetry including Saga/ Circus, A Border Comedy(Granary Books, 2001), Slowly and The Beginner (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003). The University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. Hejinian is also actively involved in collaboratively created works, the most recent examples of which include a major collection of poems by Hejinian and Jack Collom titled Situations, Sings (Adventures in Poetry, 2008). Other collaborative projects include a work entitled The Eye of Enduring undertaken with the painter Diane Andrews Hall and exhibited in 1996; a composition entitled Qúê Trân with music by John Zorn and text by Hejinian; two mixed media books (The Traveler and the Hilland the Hill and The Lake) created with the painter Emilie Clark; the award-winning experimental documentary film Letters Not About Love, directed by Jacki Ochs; and The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, co-written with nine other poets. Translations of her work have been published in Denmark, France, Spain, Japan, Italy, Russia, Sweden, China, Serbia, Holland, China, and Finland. She is the recipient of a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from the National Endowment for the Arts; she received an Award for Independent Literature from the Soviet literary organization “Poetic Function” in Leningrad in 1989. She has traveled and lectured extensively in Russia as well as Europe, and Description (1990) and Xenia (1994), two volumes of her translations from the work of the contemporary Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, have been published by Sun and Moon Press. Since 1976 Hejinian has been the editor of Tuumba Press and from 1981 to 1999 she was the co- editor (with Barrett Watten) of Poetics Journal. She is also the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning
and publishing cross-genre work by poets. She is currently serving as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the Chair of the UC-Berkeley Solidarity Alliance, an activist coalition of union representatives, workers, staff, students, and faculty fighting to maintain the accessibility and affordability of public higher education in California. -
There’s a lot going on this week, and the blog staff are trying our best to accommodate SOTA Cdubs’ busy schedule, so here are the main things on the menu:
1. Congratulations to Avi and Shanna on their upcoming publications! Avi is being published in amphibi.us, and Shanna is having her poem “Atrophy” published on Valentine’s Day in H.O.D., Issue #6. The editor originally praised Shanna’s poem, saying it was very close to what they were looking for, but did not publish it. She suggested some revisions and for Shanna to resubmit. Shanna revised, submitted, and the poem was accepted. It’s all about revision! –Heather
2. As you may have noted, the CW Blog is currently undergoing a couple of formatting changes. Some are major, some minor, but one that deserves special mention is the new official CW event calendar! For all those who cannot access the GoogleCalendar, have no fear, for it is displayed publicly right on this page.
3. As part of changes to our blog, it would be awesome if Cdubs can send Midori or Rebecca their poems or fiction pieces that they’ve published, or just particularly like and want to see on the website. We are trying to freshen up some content to make the site officially “student-run.”
DATES TO NOTE
Tomorrow, Feb. 7: You experimental poem assignment from Samantha Giles’ visit is due. Also, CAHSEE testing all morning for sophomores.
Wednesday, Feb. 8: NO LATE START. Readings and Submissions are due
Friday, Feb. 24: The Poetry OutLoud Final will be taking place in the CW room right after school. One of them will be going to Sacramento, so support your fellow Cdub!
Tuesday, April 20: Be at the Herbst Theater at 7:30 to hear Ann Lamott.
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As many of you may know, SOTA was recently renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts after the famous artist who helped found the school. At the renaming ceremony, Hosana, a sophomore in Creative Writing, read a statement about SOTA and the Creative Writing Department from author Dave Eggers. Yes, THE Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, Zeitoun, and others, and co-founder of 826 Valencia, founder of McSweeney’s, etc. You get the idea. He’s a big deal. The department is honored to have this endorsement from such a prestigious author and publisher. So, here it is, folks:
“I’ve been teaching weekly high school classes at 826 Valencia for about ten years now, and the high school most often represented in these classes is the School of the Arts. When 826 Valencia opened its doors in 2002, SOTA kids started flooding in for evening workshops, weekend activities, and our summer writing and publishing intensive. And it became clear from the start that SOTA students were uniformly hard-working, self-possessed, knowledgeable and sophisticated about their place in the world, and very serious about pursuing careers in the arts. So serious, in fact, that even after the schoolday was done, they were hungry for more. That means that SOTA is doing something — maybe everything — right. The educators at SOTA are lighting a fire within these young people, making them passionate and insatiable makers and students of the arts. Without a doubt, if I had grown up in San Francisco, I would have fought like hell to attend the School of the Arts.
The entire city owes a great debt to Ruth Asawa for her vision and persistence in making SOTA a reality, and it’s only fitting that the school’s new marquee gives her her due.
I don’t know what 826 Valencia would do without partners like SOTA, and without gifted educators like Heather Woodward.
Every year, when I’m putting together the roster for my class, which produces the anthology The Best American Nonrequired Reading, the very first thing I do is email Heather Woodward, the extraordinary creative writing head at SOTA, and say, “Send me your best and brightest.” I’m looking for young people who want to spend every Tuesday night reading contemporary literature, from the Paris Review to Granta to Mother Jones, and then break down and debate what we read. I need serious young people who can and want to read at a college level, and have no fear of hard work and of articulating their ideas among a stellar group of high schoolers from all over the Bay Area.
And invariably, Heather sends me three or four phenomenal young people who thrive and make SOTA proud. Just last week, we had our first class of the year, and there were four new SOTA students in attendance, all of them hugely impressive. It’s something I treasure every year, seeing the newest group of SOTA kids come through the door, hearing their stories, seeing them thrive.
I’ve been to a number of arts high schools around the country, and SOTA is among the very best. And this is borne out in how well SOTA students do in college. I write recommendations for the students in my classes, and SOTA students have gone onto a very impressive array of colleges all over the nation. I fully expect them to become major cultural contributors as adults — not just because they’re talented artists, but because SOTA instills in them a sense of art’s crucial role in social change….
CREATIVE WRITING 