It’s only three days into the festival, and already I am getting confused as to which handout goes with which day. Please correct me if I give the wrong assignments.
Daryl discussed introduction by mapping, using mapping, with Eaven Boland’s Object Lessons as an example. His assignment:
Rob handed out a character essence sheet used by actors, and suggested we fill it out for a character in our fiction writing. The one I scanned was the one I filled out, but you should get the idea. We also discussed “Three Soldiers” by Bruce Holland Rogers.
Jeanne suggested we read “The Time” by Naomi Shihal-Nye, “Loading the Boar” by David Lee and “Let Evening Come” by Jane Kenyoon. The last she identified as a specific type of list poem, a litany poem. This is a series of petitions. She had us write a first draft of a litany poem in class, with “Let” starting each sentence. Our Home Play was to revise this draft into stanzas of three lines each, with particular attention to the way the words sound.
Lunch Bites was the children’s day, which is always fun.
In the afternoon we had a guest instructor, Nicole Stellon O’Donnell, who just published her first book of poetry, Steam Laundry. These are persona poems, based on the letters of an early resident of Fairbanks. She spoke about persona poems, and and handed out some pages from Bite Every Sorrow, by Barbara Ras, as examples of persona poems in the voices of animals and inanimate objects. She then had us each write a persona poem using a persona which was not a person. (I used a computer.)
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