More Reading Options

From The Red Weather Reading Series: 

Greetings, earthlings. This spring, let the screen door bang and stay up late attending to the big picture with the Red Weather Reading Series. Caress, buff-out and paint over the local rust and look to the midnight stars with an April duet of great writers:

Firstly, on Tuesday, April 10, Zoe Brigley Thompson will make you a better human being with her poetry in108 Chambers at 7:35 p.m.

Zoë Brigley Thompson's first poetry collection, The Secret, was published in 2007 by Bloodaxe. It was an UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize for international writers under the age of 30. For her poetry, Zoë has won a translation fellowship with the University of East Anglia (2001), an Eric Gregory Award (2003), a Welsh Academy Bursary (2005) and the English Association Fellows' Poetry Prize (2006). She has been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize (2008) and the Arvon International Poetry Competition (2010). Her new collection of Poems, Conquest, is due out this spring.

Zoë is also an early career scholar, whose most recent project was editing the Routledge volume, Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives (2010). She has published in journals like Orbis Litterarum, The International Journal of Women’s Studies and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies.  Her research focuses on transnational feminist approaches to literature, film and art. She writes a blog The Midnight Heart. 

Find an internet representation of Zoe and her work at http://redroom.com/member/zoe-brigley-thompson

Also firstly, on Wednesday, April 18th, Matthew Kirkpatrick will wine-and-dine your sagging souls with his fiction-style storytelling in 111 Chambers at 7:35 p.m. 

Matthew Kirkpatrick is the author of Light without Heat (FC2, 2012). His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, the Notre Dame Review, Unsaid, and elsewhere. A native of Altoona, PA, he's proud to have called State College, PA home while attending Penn State as an undergraduate. He recently finished his Ph.D. at the University of Utah, and in the fall will be an Assistant Professor at North Central College in Naperville, IL.

Find an internet representation of Matthew Kirkpatrick and his work at http://www.mattkirkpatrick.com/w/

Please join us in celebrating the artistic use of free-range words on the Penn State UP campus this April. 

 

Blog Entry 12: Playing God

You've all been asked to create a main character for your short story assignment. Now, I want you to take them out of the story you are creating your for your final fiction piece and put them into a piece of flash fiction--where they die. 

Here's the reasoning: People learn a lot about themselves in extreme situations and there's no situation quite as extreme as death. Have your main character confront death in a way that suits their life. Be true to the person you've created. And then, kill them off. This exercise is meant to help you to get to know your main character better by pushing that character to the extreme.

Write at least 500 words. And remember: it's time to kill your new best friend.


Due by class on Thursday, April 5

Blog Entry 11: Flash Fiction

Here's your prompt: "Some habits are hard to break."

The goal for this writing exercise is to write a COMPLETE story in 500 words or less. Do not submit the beginning of a story or anything that isn't complete. Refer to the short shorts in the Starkey book as well as some of the flash fiction posted on Nano Fiction (see the link below).

Due by class Thursday, March 29. 

Another Poetry Reading Option

To get you started: Short (and Short-Short) Fiction Links

Writers Digest Prompts to help you get started

Great flash fiction over at Nano Fiction, where one of my favorite short-shorts, "Apology + Opportunity" by Gabe Durham, is published.

Aimee Bender's monthly writing exercises.

Lots of excellent short stories and flash fiction over at Word Riot.

TONS of Creative Writing Prompts. 346 To be exact.

A tumblr dedicated to writing prompts.

Blog Entry Ten: Short-Short Fiction

Here's your prompt:


You receive a phone call from your two best friends. 'Hey, we’ve done something terribly wrong and need your help. We can’t talk about it over the phone. Please meet us at the spot where we made our pact back in high school. You know the place.' Nervously, you grab your coat and car keys.


Write at least 500 words. 


Due by class, Thursday, March 22

Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

Extra Credit Opportunity

David Sedaris, April 13

David Sedaris is coming to Eisenhower Auditorium on April 13. If you're interested, read more about it here.

Some Thoughts on Writing Poetry

Blog Entry Nine: Concrete Imagery

Looking at the "revisions" of your Horoscope poems as well as your Formalist poetry, it is clear that we  ALL really need to work on developing our ability to create CONCRETE imagery. For the most part, it appears that we are all a tad too married to abstract language. The problem with abstract language is that it lacks specificity and, when relied upon too much, it reduces one's poetry to cliches because it is so vague and generalizing. For that reason, I want you all to practice the art of using more concrete language. Remember, word choice is key to poetry, and choosing specific and precise concrete language as opposed to vague and abstract language is a good place to begin improving one's poetry.


So, for our ninth blog assignment, I want you to start simply by finding someTHING to describe. Try to avoid doing this exercise with people, because when writing about a person it is very easy to slip into abstract descriptions that are meaningless in the context of poetry. Pick something concrete--an object of some sort. When writing about your subject, avoid abstractions like “beautiful,” “good,” “ugly,” and “happy.” Use descriptions that contribute to the character of the place or object. The windowsill isn’t just red; it is warped and peeling. The journal isn’t just on the nightstand; it is unwrinkled but covered in dust.


I want you to write a list of at least five solid and well-wrought concrete observations about your subject. If you are struggling, consider each point capturing one of the five senses. "It smells like," "It feels like," etc. 


Then, I want you to add five more observations that imbue the object with "intellectual" observation--realizations about the thing that shows that it is being observed by a thinking person. Think of it as augmenting the object with your thoughts. In that regard, I want you to take aspects of your concrete observations and consider what they could mean--what they could symbolize.


In the end, you should have a list of ten concrete observations about your object all of which use unique, specific, descriptive, lush, and concrete language to describe it and make it mean something.

Due by Thursday, March 15

English Department Undergraduate Open House, April 18

Flash Fiction Contest, Deadline March 12

Submit your work to Kalliope

Kalliope, Penn State’s undergrad literary magazine, is accepting original non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and art! Submit your work by March 15 at www.kalliopejournal.com for potential publication in the 2012 edition.


If you submit, please forward me your submission email. 

Mark Doty Reading

Blog Entry Eight: Formalist Poetry

Pick one of the forms discussed in our reading (Sonnet, Villanelle, Ghazal, Pantoum, etc) and write a poem in that form. It is not uncommon for contemporary poems to "play" with these forms--straying purposefully from iambic pentameter, complicating the rhyme scheme, etc. If you have trouble deciding which form to use and how to use it, read this to help you better understand why certain poets make certain formal choices.

Along with your poem, please write at least 250 words explaining why you chose the form you did, how it is meant to complement the content/image/idea of your poem, and, if you decided to stray from some of the form's rules, tell me which aspects and for what purpose. The main point of your summary is identifying the purpose of your formal choices.

Due by class Thursday, March 1. Please bring a copy of your poem to class. 

Extra Credit

If you submit your work to a literary journal, magazine, or contest, you may receive extra credit worth one blog entry. The same goes for attending any non-required readings or creative writing-related lectures, as well as attending/joining any creative writing clubs on campus. 

In order to receive credit, please forward your submission email to me. Also, if you attend a reading that isn't required (an extra poetry reading, for instance), simply write a reflection on your blog and then email me letting me know. If you join a creative writing club and attend at least one meeting, have one of the club's leaders email me confirming your attendance.

*Another Extra Credit Option: You may write a 500 word review of the issue of Problem Child that was handed out in class today. Post the review to your blog and then email me to let me know it's up. I have many extra copies, which I'll bring to class on Tuesday. This extra credit assignment will be due by the Tuesday after Spring Break. 

What is Formal Poetry and why should you care?

Burch, Michael. "Formal Poetry and Related Terms: Formalism, New Formalism, Neo-Formalism, Pseudo-Formalism, Neo-Classicism, Traditional Poetry, and the Multitudinous Variations Thereof," The HyperTexts.

 

Blog Entry Seven: Poetry in Conversation

Find a published poem that you admire. If you don't know where to start, think of poets you are already familiar with or begin by reading the poems anthologized in our book. You might also try digging around on various websites like The Poetry Foundation or an online literary magazine like Word Riot or WW Norton's Tumblr. Once you find the perfect poem--the one that sparks your imagination, that resonates with you and your own experiences of the world--respond to the poem with a poem of your own. It doesn't matter whether you respond to the subject of the other person's poem, or just a single line or image contained in the poem. Generally, it's most effective to respond to the moment of maximum energy or tension in the published poem. Identify what excites you about the poem; then make the same thing happen in your own work.

Aside from your own poem, please include the poem (including the author's name and date of publication) to which you are responding. Think of your poems as being in conversation with one another.

Due by class Thursday, February 23

Blog Entry Six: Horoscope Poem

Write a poem with the prompt "Horoscope." Go!

And don't forget to print out your poem and bring it to class with you on Thursday, February 16.

Due: By class, February 16, Duh. 

Nonfiction Reading, David Gessner, February 20, 8 PM, Foster Auditorium

David Gessner, an award winning nature writer best known for his edgy and humorous style and interest in ospreys and Ultimate Frisbee, will read from his work in the Foster Auditorium in the Paterno Library on the campus of Penn State, University Park, at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, February 20.  The lecture is free and open to the public.  Gessner’s most acclaimed work is the book Return of the Osprey (2001) and a sequel about following osprey migration to Cuba and South America, Soaring with Fidel (2007). His work is also closely associated with Cape Cod, including a memoir of his father’s death from cancer, A Wild, Rank Place (1997) and his account of his experiences with the Cape Cod naturalist and writer, John Hay, The Prophet of Dry Hill (2005).  Gessner has also published an account of his experiences as a student writer in Boulder, Colorado, in Under the Devil’s Thumb (1999), and a collection of essays, Sick of Nature (2004), in which he tangles with such topics as the influence of Thoreau on his writing and thinking; his relationship with his teacher, the literary biographer Walter Jackson Bate; and his long quest to win an Ultimate Frisbee national championship.  Gessner’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Orion, OnEarth, The New York Times Magazine andAmerican Scholar.  His essay about pelicans, “Learning to Surf,” won a John Burroughs Award in 2007 for the best natural history essay of the year. One Orion reviewer characterized Gessner’s writing as “Comical, energetic, and reverentially irreverent.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution called The Tarball Chronicles “a a full-strength antidote to the Kryptonite of corporate greed and ignorance,” and Publisher’s Weekly dubbed it “Brilliant.”

Blog Entry Five: Experimental Revision

For the fifth blog entry were gonna fiddle around with what you might call "experimental revision." Sometimes these experimental revisions work and sometimes they don't, but it's an approach a lot of writers use when trying to see what craft elements will suit their story best. Sometimes, you don't know until you try it and even if your experiment fails, you'll be all the more sure that your craft decisions were the right ones.

Here's what I want you to do: pick a chunk of your nonfiction essay; it can be a paragraph or the whole essay, if you like, whatever works best for you and your experiment. I then want you to do ONE of the following:

1. Change the tense. If your essay is in past tense see what it will work in present tense or vice versa. OR you could try to only change the tense of specific sections if you like.
2. Change the perspective. If you are writing in 1st person, see what it would sound like in 2nd person direct address.
3. Play with dialogue formatting. The formatting of dialogue has a profound effect on reading. You can eliminate your quotation marks a la Cormac McCarthy, or you could try putting dialogue into free, indirect discourse. You could try writing dialogue in order to mimic an accent (like Jonathan Safran Foer does in Everything Is Illuminated). Think of how the dialogue of one your favorite books is used and try to mimic that style, if you like. There are an infinite number of ways to format and manipulate dialogue. Try one!
4. Play with the order of events or ideas. If your piece is told chronologically, try mixing it up to jump around in time, or vice versa. Try rearranging the order of your ideas in a single paragraph so the logic flows better. Include section breaks and add in transitions to improve pacing.

Again, choose only ONE of these elements to experiment with to see if such a change would improve your essay. In your blog entry, please include BOTH the original excerpt as well as the changed excerpt.
Then, at the end, briefly state whether you will stick with the change or not. Why? How did this experiment affect your essay? Did it make the action awkward, confusing? Did it help further develop character or improve pacing?

Due by Thursday, February 9

Flash Fiction Writing Contest

Blog Entry Four

The introduction for Melanie Thurnstrom's book as well as the excerpt from Deborah Tall's lyrical memoir could be considered versions of the "Essay of Ideas," where the author is less interested in telling a story, and more interested with probing a problem through imagery-rich language and highly philosophical lines of inquiry that often link ideas, concepts, and cultural artifacts that don't immediately appear related. Often times, these essays have names like "On Idleness," "On Cruelness," or "Of Deformity" and "Of Superstition." Think of a similar title regarding a subject that genuinely intrigues you. Then, in, at least 400 words, attempt a lyrical meditation of that subject. Within your mini, lyrical Essay of Ideas, attempt to connect at least two concepts or subjects that might not appear related at all, but are linked within the world of your thinking on the subject at hand (it could be as random as a Twinkie and a Yeats poem, if you like).

Option for Tayari Jones Reading

Blog Entry Three

Many authors, such as David Sedaris, use the idea of "obsession" as a jumping off point for their writing. What is it that you are obsessed with? Using the techniques of narrative that we've talked about, attempt to tell a story that not only makes your obsession clear, but attempts to understand why you are obsessed in the first place. The only rule: you may not write, explicitly, "I am obsessed with..." or "I'm obsessed with X because..." Your obsession and its reasons must be implied through your storytelling.

Blog Entry Two

The focus of our second blog entry is the difference between the straight reportage of newspapers and the narrative construction of literary journalism.

You'll notice that, in your reading about Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Capote originally found the story of the Kansas murder as an article in the New York Times. I want you to do something similar, only, I'm not expecting you to write an entire book.

Dig through the headlines of various newspapers. They can be national, local -- even The Collegian will work for this assignment. Look for a news article that appears to have the potential for a good narrative treatment--a news report that is begging to be told as a story, with vivd characters, dialogue, action, and setting. You don't have to construct the whole story into a narrative, but build a single scene of action with the information from the article. It could be the most pivotal moment in the story, the climax, the calm just before the storm: you decide what you can recreate best and most vividly. The only rule is: all your information must be based on facts you collected from news sources and what you actually know about the place or time (common sense is very useful here, too).

For example, the date December 21, 2011, may become "an unusually warm day in State College," and "the victim, Alicia Jones" may become "Alicia, a 24 year old sophomore studying business at Penn State University" who "walked out her front door, only to be greeted by an ominous masked figure." You might have to find other articles to mine for more details about the event. The more specific details you have, the better. Put what people said into dialogue, use photographs to help you paint images -- even use the Farmer's Almanac to help you describe the weather.

Your scene should be no less than 250 words. Also, please include a link to the original newspaper article from which you developed your story. If you used more articles, feel free to include links to those as well.

Due by Thursday, January 19

Tayari Jones Reading: Mandatory Attendance

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series 

with support from the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment,

the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, the University Libraries,

the Department of English, and the College of the Liberal Arts

presents:

Tayari Jones

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

7:30 p.m.

Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library

Tayari Jones is the author of three novels: Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, and Silver Sparrow. The American Booksellers chose Silver Sparrow as the #1 Indie Next pick for June 2011. Jones will embark upon a national tour with media coverage to include O Magazine, Vogue, and Poets and Writers among other venues. She was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she spent most of her childhood. Although she has not lived in her hometown for over a decade, much of her writing centers on the urban south. She is a 2011 Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Reading a lot of your first entries...

...made me think of "Shirt Worthy," a New York Times Magazine article written by David Giffels in 2007. In particular, the first line of Matt S.'s "Shirt Luck" ("When my oldest brother packed his bags for San Francisco two years ago, I felt like everything cool about me was going with him." -- Nice first line, by the way) brought Giffels's essay to mind for me. 
In just 1,000 words, Giffels uses the t-shirt as 1. a way to explore male relationships, 2. a vehicle through which to tell a coming of age story about a boy into manhood and, 3. a lens through which to examine how masculinity and codes of masculinity change throughout one's life (the shirt means different things when he is a young man and when he is a father). 
Similarly, in Kristen's piece, she shows us not only the coming of age story of a girl through a nightgown, but the difficulty of completely surrendering that girlhood, too. 
Though I'm citing Kris and Matt S. in particular here (just to make a point about a developing theme among the work I'm reading), a lot of your pieces function on many similarly interesting levels. Shirts and shoes become the lens through which the reader sees many of you grow up. Fascinating! 
Keep up the good writing, guys and gals.

Gay Talese On Gay Talese

Writing Contest