I asked my Introduction to Fiction students to ‘creatively reinterpret’ a story from the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (or another story/book at my discretion). They were to turn in a creative project and an essay reflecting upon and explaining their project. The goal of the assignment was to get the student to try to consider reading stories and telling stories from a new perspective, to let him or her be creative and examine that creativity, and to step away from the standard ‘lit-crit’ essay. Many of these projects were, I think anyhow, a nice break from the grind, and I’m really happy with how they turned out. It’s these sorts of things I’ll miss about teaching.
After the break, you can have a quick look at four projects (posted with permission of the students). These are just a few of the great projects I saw. Other students wrote diary entries for the characters, made scrapbooks and photo albums to narrate the story, rewrote the endings (“Do Not Disturb” by AM Homes received this treatment quite a bit), illustrated various scenes. One student planned a three course meal based on “Sea Oak” by George Saunders; she brought pumpkin pie squares in for the class. Another student set up and video recorded four interviews with actors, two of which were based on characters from “Do Not Disturb” by AM Homes and “The Girl In The Flammable Skirt” by Aimee Bender. The other two interviews dealt with real events in the actors’ lives. The idea was to examine the similarities between fiction and reality. Finally, another student wrote and recorded a punk song based on Sam Lipsyte’s “I’m Slavering.” The song was supposed to be a demo tape from Gary’s days of trying to be a rock star despite his having a dead thumb.
More below the thing. Enjoy.
Some people have asked me what happened to my CRW101 posts on this site. The answer is that I stopped writing them, because after we read Cymbeline, the nature of the class shifted and we went into workshop mode. Since we’re now reading student work and not publicly available work, it doesn’t leave me with a whole lot to share. But, before that change happened–or rather, I guess, on the cusp of it–I did something I almost never do in any class I teach: I prepared a lecture and then I delivered it. The lecture was on the nature of revision, and was helpfully entitled “Revision: An Almost Obscenely Brief Overview.” Increasingly I wonder about the necessity of that qualifier, “almost,” but as we approach the end of the semester, and the due date of their final, some of my students have asked if I would make the lecture available (possibly because I promised to do it at the time, then forgot to) and so I’ve decided to post it here. The “lecture,” such as it is, runs just about 2000 words, and it doesn’t attempt to be in any sense comprehensive. It is intended for an audience of beginning writing students, some of whom may be encountering the concepts of editing and revision for the first time. It is divided into two parts. The first part discusses how–and if–to develop material from in-class exercises (and/or free-writes) into workable and work-with-able drafts. The second part outlines two basic principles of editing–adding stuff, taking stuff away–and the advantages of reading your work aloud and editing by ear. The whole thing demonstrates a clear bias towards realist prose fiction–especially in its examples–but the attempt was made to be inclusive, and most of these notions should be adaptable for use by anyone.
