Freewriting

Freewrite--An Exercise in creativity, or...

It's an exercise in creativity, certainly, but much more than that. English 268 is set up as a creative non-fiction class, and it is every bit of that. The emphasis is on the creative part. Most every day there's a freewriting event. We're required to put the pen on paper, and not lift it off, scribbling whatever free association words, ideas, thoughts, wacky concepts and ephemera come to mind--no thinking; just writing, writing, writing. It sounds crazy, useless, mostly a way for the teacher to take a break in the middle of a two-hour class. But the exercise has an amazing ability to dislodge jammed up concepts, constipation of the brain and generally viscous thoughts that are otherwise begging to be born. Some of the stuff is even usable!  Try it sometime: take a prompt, let's say "I'm afraid to..." and go to town. Just scribble and write and jot and scratch until your hand is numb. You might be amazed at the direction and result you come up with. 
In the picture above, one of my get-rich quick products is shown. It was a diary of sorts, an E-Book designed with the basic freewriting concept in mind. Take one of the diaries--they were called Burn The Baggage--open to the day in question, such #29 which would be today, and read the prompt. Then write down all the scary, angry, fearful, useless, restricting thoughts you have about that prompt, and get it out of your system. The idea was to do this for thirty days, then burn the results, burn the baggage that keeps you trapped in place and won't let you create what it is you're capable of creating. Burn the negative to end up with the positive. Just don't burn your homework.

Traveling Light

Traveling Light is...

Ease and comfort are very good things. It's gratifying to live in a place where warmth, safety, comfort and convenience are a given. But it's equally good to know our footprint is as small as possible on a fragile planet, and maybe getting smaller. There's a growing realization in the world that we have not been sufficiently cautious with our resources or environment. As I wander the campus I see indications everywhere of new and useful ways we conserve, re-use and cut down on disposable items, from paper products in classrooms, to excessive maintenance of buildings and grounds, to simple things like recycling of otherwise disposable items. The trend is hopeful: more and more teachers are using on-line resources, new buildings are much more efficient and even toilets are more environmentally friendly. The best part of this is that we seem to be more aware of the need to address these issues, and there seems to be more political will to move forward on them. Let's hope we continue the trend, and our children and grandchildren will thank us for giving them the best gift possible.

Summer '10

Summer?

Welcome to Summer term 2010, and English 268, creative non-fiction. The picture doesn't look much like Summer, but that's the idea. Keats spoke about the concept of negative capability: It's being able to hold two contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time and still have the ability to function. I like to think of it as the willing suspension of belief. If we can entertain two seemingly opposing thoughts, and have them bounce around and be perfectly content interacting with each other, for long periods of time, then we're on the way to negative capability.  Here's an example of how this could work in reality as opposed to fiction. As I write this, a good friend is visiting her daughter at school in New Zealand. Here in Columbus yesterday the high temperature reached about 85 degrees F. Where Barbara is, the high was 40 degrees F. give or take. Not exactly snowy and blizzarding like the picture above, but not shirtsleeves weather either. So the two opposing ideas concept isn't so difficult if we expand our vision just a bit.

Summer term is going to be like that; I look forward to writing as much as I can in a very short time, bypassing my usual requirement to tweak, rewrite, edit, rephrase and redo any and all manuscripts. Rewriting has always been a necessity, but it appears my system, if you can call it that, may be considered a luxury in this class. English 268 started yesterday. Our first assignment was a free write lasting nearly ten minutes. One parcel of some value emanating from that exercise was the realization that writing in such a way drives out some of the fear of failing to write any other way, or in patching words together in a way that makes sense to me. One of the main fears in life, certainly for a writer, is that the product makes no sense. John Ciardi mentioned this fear concerning his poetic works. He said his fear was that he'd left part of the poem in his head. If we get away leaving even a part of the story in our heads, or still in the pen, then we've not fully succeeded. So perhaps the free write is always the way to go, at least at first. Then, after a bit of incautious scrambling and/or parsing of the words and meanings and expressions, we put the work out there fully and forlornly half-dressed, and see who gets it? Stay tuned. It will be an interesting Summer.

 

Finals week

Why Be Normal?

Finals week on campus, once again. It's been quite the term: more than a dozen entries in the student paper, lots of new stuff--like the student union which opened at the beginning of the term, a very productive and informative meeting with folks at the creative writing school and other signposts along the way to a goal I've dreamed of for 30 years.  I am firmly entrenched in the school, the curriculum and the method. I am well on my way to the degree that eluded me way back in the twentieth century. The fellow you see above is acting like a kid again, being basically abnormal because it felt good, and hey, if other students can act like this, why not me? I've seen way weirder stuff, things that make my hat look pretty lame in comparison. Besides, it was a great hat. It was manufactured on the spot by a balloon expert who was an alum back in '72, about the time I would have graduated had it not been for the fact that the balloon went up, and I traded my college hat for a helmet and all that boring, military history stuff. It's good to be back, especially considering the fact that I can wear such hats and no one thinks it's silly.  Why be normal? You see what it got me back in '69? Well, there you go.