Summer Reading and Reception

                                             

 

CWI’s Summer Reading and Reception

Families and friends of our CWI writers are invited to attend our Summer Reading and hear the poems, prose, and dramatic writing that our talented young writers have been working on this summer! We will also present our 2012 edition of The Purchase Review, which will be available for free through Lulu.com.

Friday, August 3rd

1:30-3:30 Reading and Reception

Natural Sciences Building

First Floor, Room 1001 (Lecture Hall)

 

 

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Monday, 7/30: Revisons!

This week we will finish, workshop, and revise the pieces for the lit mag and for the reading. There will an extra workshop so that everyone has ample opportunity to receive feedback. I encourage you to send you work to me, Anna, and/or Linnea, to get our feedback.

For the reading:
Each person will have about five minutes to read. This will be 4-5 pages double-spaced. You may choose anything that you wrote or worked on this summer: prose, poetry, drama (one-acts and monologues). Also note that you can read a combination, for example: a poem, a piece of flash fiction, and an excerpt from a novella.

For the lit mag:
2-5 pieces. If you are submitting poetry and/or flash fiction, I would like you to put in more pieces. If you are submitting all or mostly prose, it's fine to put in fewer.
Author's Bio: please write up a little blurb about yourself. Here are some examples. My personal favorite in #20.  Here are some more examples. If you scroll down, you will see a "tag line" and an "extensive bio." You can do either. I would like you to limit the amount of specific information (geography, school name, etc.) and speak in more general terms.

Afternoon:

Read-Around:

Mini-workshop
Daniel, Samuel, Megha, Lina

Friday

Write: Monologues, one-acts, and other work
Read-around

Lunch

Workshop: Sarah, Samantha, Samuel, Jake, Rose, Katie

Kraken

As per our discussion yesterday, this is the Kraken (thanks, Daniel!). Lamprey eel-ish, I'd say. Also, gross.

Thursday, 7/26: One-Act Plays

 "I wrote all the time. Everywhere. When I wasn't writing, I was thinking about it or continuing to 'write' in my head. . . . I wasn't very good company. At that time, a major critic commented that I wrote 'disposable plays,' and in some sense he was probably right. But nothing mattered to me then except to get the stuff down on paper. . . . There was never a sense, in all this, of evolving a style or moving on to a bigger, longer, 'more important' form. Each play had a distinct life of its own and seemed totally self-contained within its one-act structure."

-- Sam Shepard

Morning:
Today and tomorrow, we're going to be writing ten-minute plays or one-act plays.

•  A good ten-minute play is not a sketch or an extended gag, but rather a complete, compact play, with a beginning, middle and end. It typically takes place in one scene and runs no more than ten pages. (source)
• One-acts can run anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour or more...Arguably the most popular length for one-acts is around a half-hour. (source) 

One-act play: Is It Me?
Excerpt from (Three-Act) The Importance of Being Earnest


Afternoon:
Workshop
Daniel, Jack, Mick, Megha, Paige

Wednesday, 7/25: Form

• Finish Breakaway poems
• Writing period
• Sonnets
• Shakespeare's sonnet 118

Prompt:

• Write a "Dear John" letter in the form of a sonnet
• Write a love poem in one of the above forms
• Write a rant in the form of a sonnet

Game: Limericks

Breakaway Poems (Group)

Introduce prose poetry:

"Though the name of the form may appear to be a contradiction [sort of, look at the links], the prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry. In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson explained, 'Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.'" poets.org

Poems Referenced:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22136#
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20957#
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15306
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15578

As a class: brainstorm and select 3 words that will appear in all sections of all poems
As a group: decide who will write in what style (prose, rhyming quatrains, non- rhyming couplets with emjambment)
Each person will write a segment of the wole poem. The speakers will be distinguished by style, but also by content, which will be determined by the group. Examples are: different speakers at the same event; different timeframes or eras; three places at the same time, talking about the same thing or event.