ENG 9CE: Creative Expression in Writing
3 units, Fall 2013
Course Description:
Creative Expression in Writing is a writing class that explores daily creative practice. This
quarter, you’ll be challenged to push your creative limits and to take risks in your work.
Together we’ll explore how we can become more alert to the world and how, through
language, we can respond in fresh ways to the events of our lives. As we imagine other
realities and engage in a conversation with the long tradition of art, we’ll practice thinking
flexibly and seeing opportunity in failure. In this class, you will be a member of a community
of writers prepared to challenge and support each other as we navigate the process of creation.
This quarter, you’ll generate ideas that you will develop and shepherd through revision. The
course offers opportunities for you to experiment with form and content and to develop a
vocabulary with which to discuss your own work. Through close reading, writing exercises,
collaborative projects, performance, workshops, and discussion, you’ll explore the role
creativity plays in your own life.
Creative Expression in Writing fulfills Stanford’s Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing Creative
Expression Requirement: The ability to design, create, and perform – each enriches our lives in substantial
and meaningful ways. Thinking creatively, giving expressive shape to ideas, and communicating those ideas with
imagination and precision are not only indispensable to all artistic endeavors, they also represent broadly
applicable skills that strengthen and enhance traditional academic pursuits, stimulate effective problem-solving,
and foster originality and innovation in new areas.
Course Objectives for Creative Expression students:
1. Explore your own potential and produce original creative projects.
2. Engage in artistic collaboration and the creative reinterpretation of art made by others.
3. Take creative risks beyond your comfort zones
4. Experience what it is to make the unimagined possible and real.
5. Appreciate how experimentation, failure, and revision can play a valuable role in the
creation of successful and innovative works.
6. Consider multiple and possibly divergent solutions to a problem.
7. Explore the role of artistic expression in addressing issues that face society.
Schedule
Ten Weeks, with one 110-minute class (Mondays 10-11:50) and one 50-minute lab (e.g.
Wednesdays 10-10:50 or 11-11:50) per week.
Requirements
Participation (35%): Coming to class and lab prepared and on time; contributing thoughtfully to
discussions; reading and responding insightfully to published or peer work; participating in
group improv and performance activities. This class depends on the full participation of its
members. Please keep the tone in the classroom professional, constructive, and respectful; it
is possible to be both generous and rigorous.
Written Exercises (35%): Over the course of the quarter, you will complete several written
exercises, both in class and out. These exercises will include imitations, flash fiction, poetry
and prose poems, observations, and illustrations. You will keep a daily creativity journal. At
the end of the quarter you will compile and turn in a portfolio of your work, which will
include revisions of some of these exercises and a creative manifesto. More on this later!
Collaborative Project (15%): End-of-term collaborative project, to be presented to the class.
Reading & Performance Attendance (15%):You must attend at least three events over the course
of the quarter: the Improv Night (Monday, October 7th), the final class reading (Monday,
December 2nd), and
Absences & Late Arrivals
You are allowed two absences throughout the quarter, no questions asked. After that, your
grade will drop one letter for every unexcused absence. If you do miss a class, you are
responsible for making up any work you missed that day. Late arrivals are disruptive to the
class; if you are more than ten minutes late, or leave early without prior permission, it will
count as an absence. Repeated tardiness may be treated as an unexcused absence at our
discretion.
Content of Creative Pieces
Because this class is based on collective trust, you should not include references to any
instructors or students in your work. If you feel you must, you should discuss this with me
before you submit the piece. Furthermore, I ask that the content of other students’ work not
be discussed outside of class.
Email Policy
I do not accept any work submitted through email, though I encourage you to ask questions
and/or voice concerns via email. I’ll usually respond within two days.
Academic Honesty
All work submitted for this class must be your own and written for this class. Obviously.
Please familiarize yourself with Stanford’s Honor Code:
http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/judicialaffairs/policy/honor-code
Late Assignments
The highest grade any late assignments will receive is a C—even if you’ve just forgotten to
print out an exercise for class. Please don’t email me late work—put it in the box outside my
office. Late work will not receive written feedback.
Laptops, Cell Phones, Food
Laptops may be used only during in-class writing exercises, with WIFI off. Feel free to bring
them to class, but don’t leave them on the table or open during general discussion. Because
ringing and buzzing and One Direction are disruptive, all cell phones should be switched off
prior to entering the classroom. If for some reason you must be reachable, please talk to me
before class. Snacks are permitted (encouraged if there’s enough for everyone!) as long as they
are eaten quietly and neatly and all garbage is disposed of, and as long as you can still
participate fully in the discussion.
Students with Documented Disabilities
Students who may need an academic accommodation based on the impact of a disability must
initiate the request with the Office of Accessible Education (OAE). Professional staff will
evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend reasonable accommodations,
and prepare an Accommodation Letter for faculty dated in the current quarter in which the
request is being made. Students should contact the OAE as soon as possible since timely
notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. The OAE is located at 563 Salvatierra Walk
(phone: 723-1066, URL: http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/oae).
CLASS CALENDAR
Please note: this is subject to change, depending on the needs of the class!
Week 1: CREATIVITY AND CREATIVE PRACTICE
--What is creativity? What does it mean to develop and maintain a personal creative practice?
How do we go about doing it?
Readings:
Sandra Cisneros, “My Name”
Michael Martone, “Contributor’s Note”
Shelley Carson, “Brainsets and the Creative Process”
Week 2: BECOMING A PERSON ON WHOM NOTHING IS LOST
--How is creativity a response to the world as it is? How can we become observers of both the
internal worlds and the external? How can concrete language and specific, revealing details
create an experience for the reader?
Readings:
Joanne Beard, “Behind the Screen”
A Selection of Haikus
Robert Hass, “A Story About the Body”
Some descriptions of faces
Scott McCloud, excerpts from Making Comics
Elizabeth Tallent, “No One’s a Mystery”
Week 3: THE LAND OF THE FIGURATIVE
--How does art and writing transcend the “real”? The “real” vs. the “true.”
Readings:
Aloysius Bertrand “Five Fingers of the Hand”
Sandra Cisneros, “Hair”
Jack Gilbert, “Michiko Dead”
Michael Martone, “The Mayor of the Sister City Speaks to the Chamber of
Commerce in Klamath Falls, Oregon, on a Night in December, 1996”
Sharon Olds, “Feared Drowned”
Jean Toomer, “Portrait in Georgia”
Week 4: ACCIDENTS AND FAILURE & PLAYING WITH FORM
--What are we afraid of in our creative practices? How can trial and error, accidents, and
failure (both artistic and personal), be productive?
MONDAY, OCTOBER 7, 7pm: Improv workshop!
Readings:
Failure:
Lynda Barry, “Two Questions”
Padgett Powell, “A Gentleman’s C”
Forms:
Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings”
Lucas Cooper, “Class Notes”
Lydia Davis, “Letter to a Funeral Parlor,” “Jury Duty”
James Richardson, “Vectors: 36 Aphorism”
George Saunders, “I Can Speak!”
Anne Carson, “Short Talks” (handout)
Week 5: WORD GAMES
--How might “play” influence our creative work? How might rules offer us useful constraints?
Readings:
Abecedarian:
Dinty Moore, “Son of Mr. Green Jeans”
Anagrams:
Terrance Hayes: “Nuclear,” “Overseas,” “Masculine”
Kevin McFadden, “I.e.”
Palindrome:
James Lindon, “Doppelganger”
Randell Mann, “Order”
Sestinas:
Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina”
Mark Strand, “Chekhov: A Sestina”
Anton Chekhov, excerpt from The Notebooks of Anton Chekhov
(Koteliansky/Woolf, trans.)
Sestina spiral diagram, courtesy of wikipedia.org
Rebus Puzzles
Triolets:
G.K. Chesterton, “Triolet”
Frances Cornford “To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train”
Sandra McPherson, “Triolet”
A.E. Stallings, “Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther”
Wendy Cope, “Valentine”
Dana Gioia, “The Country Wife”
Peter Kline, “Triolet for Late July”
Week 6: REVISION
--How do we re-see our pieces to make productive changes? Why might we want to revise at
all? How can we complicate and develop our pieces and push deeper into the mystery?
Readings:
Katie Williams’ “Bone Hinge” drafts
Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” drafts (handout)
Eliot/Pound “The Wasteland” drafts (handout)
Week 7: WITNESS & CHANGE
--How does art comment on the larger world? Can art change the world? How does a viewer’s
experience of the work change the writer/artist?
Readings:
Carolyn Forche, “The Colonel”
W.S. Merwin, “The Dachau Shoe”
Jesse Lee Kercheval, “Carapathia”
Week 8: ART AND CONVERSATION
--How do written and visual arts intersect?
Readings:
W.H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Lynda Barry, excerpts from 100!Hundred! Demons!:
“Introduction,” “Head Lice & My Worst Boyfriend,” “Common Scents”
Richard Blanco, “Mango, #61”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Don’t Let that Horse…”
Kay Ryan, “Every Painting by Chagall”
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
William Carlos Williams, “This is Just to Say”
Kenneth Koch, “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams”
Lawrence Sutin, excerpts from A Postcard Memoir
Lab: Meet at Cantor Arts Center, where we’ll write our own ekphrastic pieces.
Week 9: PAST, FUTURE, and the ELASTIC MOMENT: EXPERIMENTS IN TIME
Memory and Experiments in Time.
--What does time/timeliness/timelessness have to do with art? How do we effectively
use/play with/understand/subvert time in our writing? How does art serve to stop/suspend
time? How can our memories and hopes/fears for the future fuel our work? How can we
make the reader experience a moment that no longer exists?
Readings:
Joanna Avallon, “All This”
Amy Bender, “The Rememberer”
John Cheever, “Reunion”
Peggy McNally, “Waiting”
Greg Orr, “A Litany”
John Struloeff, “The Man I Was Supposed to Be”
Tobias Wolff, “Bullet in the Brain”
Week 10: CELEBRATING & CONTINUING THE CREATIVE JOURNEY
---Where do we go from here? Final portfolios due.
Readings:
Lorrie Moore, “How to Become a Writer”
NO LAB: In lieu of lab, both Creative Expression classes will meet for final
celebratory reading MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 7pm.