An update from our sixty-eighth Writing Workshop A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, September 17, plus some of the output published below In this workshop, we covered the idea of ‘sense of place.’ The students learned that sense of place is a literary device that not only evokes physical, objective descriptions, but also uses vivid imagery to capture the thoughts and feelings of a character about a certain place. We studied numerous example of sense of place within literature and music, including Jack London’s Call of the Wild and an excerpt from Claire Rinterknecht’s story featured in the March 2020 issue of Stone Soup. Students participated in a brief 5 minute write in which half of the class described a place as a neutral narrator and the other half described a place through the lens of a character. Pearl, Greta, Nami, and Peri all shared their incredible work before we moved into our half-hour writing period, during which Peri, Yueling, Pearl, and Ava read. Overall, we had a blast kicking off this fall semester and look forward to more great work yet to come! The Challenge: Describe a place or a setting in which a story will take place. 1) Describe as the omniscient narrator, like the art director for a movie set description including lighting and mood. OR 2) Write from the point-of-view of a character. This is the skeleton vision of the place (lighting, sound, feeling, etc.) as appropriate to your vision. The Participants: Anya, Ava, Celia, Cora, Greta, Nami, Pearl, Peri, Reethi, Sofia, Yueling Arctic Winter Pearl Coogan, 10 Cold howling wind whipped through my fur, blowing endlessly. The deep snow crunched under my paws, stretching as far as my keen blue eyes could see. Snow-covered mounds that were once grey cliffs rose out of the white sea, not a hint of rock visible on them. Farther beyond the once-cliffs were the towering mountains, also covered in snow that was continuously piling higher and higher. The streams that ran and pulled in spring were now completely frozen over with ice. Everything was beautiful. But like many things, the looks of the tundra didn’t say much about the tundra. I couldn’t see or smell any other animals except the six other wolves in my pack, all of them my relatives. The prey, even the caribou, had disappeared like all the other animals, having hidden in their snow-covered burrows or migrated south. To make it even worse, the falling snow prevented me from seeing far. I was an Arctic wolf living in my Arctic habitat with a thick winter coat, but I was still shivering. The snow, though beautiful, covered up all of the hare’s burrows and even rocks that I could fall and hurt myself on. Hunger, as ruthless as ever, gnawed at my stomach. But I had survived one cruel Arctic winter before and could live through another, even if I wasn’t thriving. “Taiga!” My cousin Icicle called, standing on top of one of the snow-mounds, clearly trying to find prey like me and the rest of my pack. But, unlike me and the pack, she wasn’t a good hunter. At all. “Leave her alone, Icicle! She’s a much better hunter than you,” Icicle’s mother and my father’s younger sister Snowclaw growled. Icicle bowed his small head and padded down from the mound he was standing on. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. He was still young with plenty of room to improve his hunting skills and Snowclaw didn’t seem to like him at all. Smelling a wisp of deeply burried hare, I started digging into the endless sea of snow. The smell grew stronger, more vivid, as I dug. Crackly brown grass started to appear, a hole in the middle of it. Lighting up, I started digging in the hole. Surprised yellow eyes glared at me. The snowshoe hare leaped up and started sprinting away from me, but he was tired from his hibernation and wasn’t use to running in such deep snow. My paws pattered on the ground, barely touching the snow before they lifted up. The howling wind was even louder and stronger as I ran, flurries snaking down faster. Suddenly I wasn’t cold anymore. Suddenly the Arctic winter wasn’t as menacing anymore. My sharp fangs sank into the hare’s neck, sinking deeper and deeper. I knew my teeth, once gleaming white, would be stained with blood for days. But I didn’t care. Once I had thought that in the winter, the tundra was a cruel place. A menacing place. An evil place. But now I knew that it wasn’t so terrible. There was still prey but you had to work to find it. There was still warmth but you had to rely on other wolves for it. There was still water but you had to break through the ice to drink it. After all, why would nature make the tundra so cruel that the only good things about were the looks. Holding my head high, I trotted back to my den with my pack following me. My aunt and uncle had brought down a caribou and my brother had caught a bird, so combined with my hare, there would be plenty of food to go around. Maybe not as much as the bounty of prey in spring, but enough to thrive through the not-so-cruel arctic winter. To Let Go Aditi Nair, 14 And I let go. It happened to be a fall much similar to the ones I’ve seen on T.V, and I was ready–well, sort of ready. The adrenaline came to me like a lightning bolt, but I know that this was the best scenario, if any at all. It felt like the world was racing to greet me on all sides, and everything
Writing Workshop
How Stories Work: Writing Workshop #68: Six Ways a Scene Can Fail
An update from our sixty-eighth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, May 27 In the last workshop of our spring season, Conner outlines six ways a scene can fail. Number one: it starts too early. It’s better to start late, to skip greetings, and to start when the events actually become important to the reader. Number two: it ends too late. It’s better to end the scene before there is a conclusion and to end on an emotional note. Number three: it has “a predictable present story.” In other words, the scene has a setting that has often been used before and has a character that fits into the setting rather than stands out in it. An example Conner gave was “a soldier on a battlefield.” Number four: it employs “narcissistic central intelligence.” This is when a writer humiliates or belittles a character to make some kind of statement. Characters should be treated as human beings, not props. Number five: it doesn’t have an arc. The scene should have some kind of structure. Number six: its ending is an answer. It is better to ask another question rather than offer the answer to a previous one. The Challenge: Write a scene. The Participants: Emma, Seva, Anushka, Yueling, Stella, Samarina, Liesl, Philip, Aaron
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #67: Translation
An update from our sixty-seventh Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, May 13 We began the workshop by discussing the etymology of translation. Translation comes from the Latin phrase, “to be carried across.” Conner encouraged us to adopt a more “experimental view of translation.” He told us that there were many types of translation, such as ekphrasis, and that it is important to think of translation outside the boundaries of translation cliches—that things are “lost in translation” and that the translator is a traitor. We looked at some examples of translation. We read an excerpt from Dante’s Inferno in the original Italian and then three translations of it into English. The translations by John Ciardi, Robert Pinsky, and Clive James all focused on the rhyme scheme. However, Mary Jo Bang’s version had no rhyme scheme and used more colloquial language, focusing more on writing a poem that sounded just as good in English as it did in Italian rather than on literal translation. We thought about the question, “What matters most in translation?” Is it word accuracy, or conveying a feeling? The Challenge: Write a homolinguistic translation of Tomaz Salamun’s “Ships” and a homophonic translation of “Catullus 70” by Gaius Catullus. The Participants: Emma, Anushka, Stella, Samarina, Yueling, Philip, Catherine, Amaya, Aaron, Madeline, Seva, Nova
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #66: Ekphrasis
An update from our sixty-sixth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett and special guest Emma Catherine Hoff A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, May 6 This week, winner of the Stone Soup 2022 Annual Book Contest Emma Catherine Hoff instructed the workshop. To start, Emma told workshop participants that ekphrasis is “when you write a poem or story about or based on a work of art.” Then, we looked at three examples of ekphrastic poetry (“The Man with the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens, “Hunters in the Snow” by William Carlos Williams, and “Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad” by Edward Hirsch) and talked about them. Emma explained that there were different ways to write an ekphrastic poem or story; one can describe the painting, or use it as a way to develop one’s own ideas. One can even place the artist in their piece! The Challenge: Write a story or poem using ekphrasis based on one of three paintings: The Peasant Wedding by Pieter Bruegel the Younger, The Football Players by Henri Rousseau, or Coffee Table by Ernst Ludwig. The Participants: Anushka, Yueling, Liesl, Philip, Ananya, Seva, Josh, Stella, Aaron, Catherine
