This week in Creative Writing, we had a ton of hands-on experiences writing in new places and with feedback from professionals. We started the week focused on developing stories and characters, discussing some key story structures from a variety of scholars, Joseph Campbell to Etienne Souriau. Then, students wrote monologues from the perspective of a character.

The next day, actress and educator (and Alexa’s high school roommate!) Vanessa came in to do cold readings of our monologues and give us feedback. Her insights were spot-on and we loved hearing her read our work out loud (especially when she did a British accent for Zubair’s piece!). In addition, she led us in some fun theater games, too.

We partnered up with Gender Studies to take a trip to the mall, where we discussed some readings and completed writing prompts about gender, commodification, and memory. It was nice to get out of the classroom and use our observational and critical skills in a new environment.

Finally, we rolled on over to The Book Mill to meet up with poet Matt Miller (Milling with Miller, get it?) for some practice revising our work. Miller had us find the best sentence of our piece, then copy out that sentence and start our pieces again from there. This way, the first sentence became one of the best sentences. This worked wonders even in our short time together. Miller left us by reading aloud a poem by W. S. Merwin, “Berryman,” about advice to young writers.

We’re excited to continue working on and revising our final projects with all of the wisdom from this week!