Summer Festival 2

Peggy Shumaker

July 20, 2010

Peggy’s prompt for today was to combine a specific time, a specific place, something important to the narrator personally, and some wider concern. We could use prose or poetry.

Peggy’s homework assignment was to focus on one detail of what we had written and expand on it.

David Crouse

David had us practice recognizing scene, reading the starts of stories to us and having us indicate when a scene started. He pointed out that scene involved a specific time and place. Examples he used were from Richard Ford’s “Time and Place,”, Rachel Ingales “Times Like These,” and Sherman Alex’s “The toughest Indian in the world.” He had us close our eyes and then describe the ceiling of the room. None of us noticed the computer projector overhead. Things on the periphery of a scene help give realism to the scene. The then gave us an in-class exercise: write a quiet scene–a conversation, perhaps–with a peripheral event or series of evens that become an annoyance.

David’s homework assignment was to revise what we had written in class.

Jeanne Clark

Jeanne introduced broadsides and then a poetic form called an Aubade. It’s not a verse form, but a content form, and very old. The content involves illicit lovers parting when a watchman (not necessarily a person) warns of dawn. The guidelines she gave us were:

Night is the positive time; daylight is unwelcome.

The parting at daybreak is central.

Another creature beside the lovers must be included. The other creature is often, but not always, a bird.

Our work must include images or sensory details of both night and dawn. Prose or poetry, the form was not important here.

Homework: revise

Our afternoon segment was to visit the UAF Museum and let the exhibits inspire a piece of writing.

Summer Festival 1

Peggy Shumaker

Rules of the road to start with: anyone, especially class members, is welcome to post, as comments, pieces of writing in response to the prompts or homework assignments given for the next two weeks. Your comments will take a little while to appear, as I have to approve them–but that’s mostly a guard against spam posts.

Today was mostly introductory. Peggy Shumaker started out by getting us to meet each other and introduce the person next to us.

David Crouse

David Crouse satisfied himself with a group exercise that involved no writing and no homework today–but I don’t expect that to last! He had us think about who we were writing for–to answer the question, “what would ________ think of this? and invite us to develop critics, based on people we had known, in our heads. Then we discussed the qualities of our perceived audience. (I wish all of us could have the audience we wound up describing!)

Jeanne Clark

Jeanne Clark did have us writing in class–twice. She recommended word lists as prompts, and our homework for today is to start our own word lists. For today she read us a poem–A Blessing, by James Wright, and asked to write down interesting words from that poem. Then we had to add more words of our own, and pick at least five from the combined list. Finally we were to write a short piece, poetry or prose, giving images on a journey familiar to the writer and using all five words in some form.

The normal schedule will be Peggy, David and Jeanne (in that order) in the morning, with varying activities in the afternoon, but for this first day, Peggy took the first hour of the afternoon. She gave us a website to investigate: http://www.newpages.org. Then she talked about compression, using Ted Kooser as an example. Finally, she passed out postcards (large ones, thank goodness) and asked us to write something that would fit on them–again, prose or poetry. This writing assignment was to be based on an image which was combined with something totally unlike that image. Copies of this assignment from some of the students will be passed on to one of the painting classes as possible inspirations for their paintings.

Finally all three of our guest writers talked about revision. Jeanne gave us a prompt to revise something we had written earlier in the day–write the opposite of what you have written. She also had us take our lines out of order. Several short poems written earlier in the day actually benefitted from this treatment.

Since this was the first day, I’ll give the afternoon schedules for the rest of the week here:

Tuesday we visit the UA Museum, touring the galleries on our own, gathering ideas and writing.

Wednesday we will have Theresa Bakker as a guest writer.

Thursday we have no afternoon class session, but our three faculty members will be giving a free reading at the Museum Education Center from 5:30-7:30 pm.

Friday volunteers read for Tom Nixon’s painting class and possibly bring back paintings to inspire us. We also have a visit scheduled to the Georgeson Botanical Gardens–if the weather permits. (For what it’s worth, the current forecast is mostly cloudy with chance of showers, high near 70.

I’ll post my responses to the prompts as comments. Hope more of you do the same!

Land Corals (Homecoming Glossary)

LAND CORALS: Lai’s name for a form of primitive life on Riya.  They are best thought of as photosynthesizing colonial algae that secrete calcium carbonate, living in the wave zone on land. The calcium carbonate towers can be up to a couple of meters in height.

Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival

It’s almost here–in fact, the organizational meeting and reception is Sunday.

What’s almost here?

The Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival is held for two weeks each summer on the University of Alaska Fairbanks Campus, and attracts students and artists from around the world. I think it started out with music, but visual arts, dance, ice skating, healing arts and literary arts have been added over the years. Most classes are an hour or so a day, often combined with private lessons. Creative Writing, which I’ve been taking almost since it started, is all day, five days a week, for two weeks, plus homework. Needless to say, this is going to interfere with my usual blogging, so I’ve decided that for the next two weeks I’ll post class assignments, both the prompts (which will differ each day) and what I’ve done with one of them as a first draft. If I can get other class members’ takes on the same prompts, I may post them as well or encourage the other students, or anyone else who wants, to post theirs as comments.

Our usual class format has been four writers–three in the morning and one after lunch–plus some extra activity in the afternoon–a field trip, a writer outside the faculty guests, even a totally different activity, like the collage art we did last year. Peggy Shumaker,  the main organizer and a poet, is always one of the writers featured, and we usually have a writer from the UAF English faculty and at least one writer from outside the Fairbanks area. This year it’s Peggy, David Crouse (fiction) and Jeanne Clark (non-fiction) from California. I don’t know yet what the format will be, with just three people listed, but I’ll find out at the first meeting, Monday.

Creative writing isn’t the only thing going on at the Festival, of course. There’s Lunch Bites–brown bag noons with performances by both guest artists and (especially the second week) students. Concerts just about every evening and both weekends, at least one public reading by our guest writers, demonstrations, and art shows. This year there are a number of mini-workshops, lasting from 45 minutes to half a day for a single day. I was tempted by the glass blowing and fusing classes, and by the one on using modern technology to create short DVD’s. (A book trailer, perhaps?) I’ll check it out Sunday, but I’m likely to be too tired to take it in by the 28th.

So, on with the Festival! Hope to see you there or in the comments, if not this year, then in the future.

Planetary Assembly (Homecoming Glossary)

PLANETARY ASSEMBLY: The ruling body on Central. The members are elected and are Humans (Çeren index less than 72), though a fifth of the seats are occupied by Humans with detectible R’il’nian traits.

Kikia Fruit (Homecoming Glossary)

KIKIA FRUIT: A Riyan tree fruit with an extremely high water content and a rather bland flavor. It is triangular in shape and rose-pink in color when ripe. Useful primarily as a thirst-quencher.

Meld (Homecoming Glossary)

MELD: A very tight mind-link, so tight that the various individuals are temporarily fused into a single identity.

Peacemint (Homecoming Glossary)

PEACEMINT: A plant originally grown by the Jibeth healers for the tranquilizing effect of its mint-citrus odor and of a tea brewed from its leaves. It also acts as a muscle relaxant when rubbed on the skin. The leaves are bright green, overlain with a sheen like gold dust.

Mind-link (Homecoming Glossary)

MIND-LINK: A mental connection between two or more telepaths that allows them to communicate or to work together.

Corridor System (Homecoming Glossary)

CORRIDOR SYSTEM: A series of small rooms, generally attached to buildings, with mechanical teleports between them. To a non-esper, they simply look and feel like corridors, though the view through any windows is not continuous and ears may pop a bit. A trained esper can feel out and reset the jump-gates to go somewhere other than the default setting.