An update from our sixty-third Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, April 15 In this week’s workshop, we talked about different ways to begin a story. Conner began by saying we often feel the need to start a story with exposition—to start with loads of background information. We looked at openings of various stories and novels and found that in fact, there are many other ways to begin. We looked at stories that start in media res, or in the middle, such as The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Other pieces, such as The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, introduce a tone. Some examples, like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are humorous, others poetic. In the first few sentences of Toni Morrison’s Jazz, we even found the entire plot! To sum up the presentation, we reviewed three ways to begin a work of fiction that don’t involve mere exposition: we can reveal something, establish a style (or mood), or establish a theme or conflict. The Challenge: Write five different openings. The Participants: Emma, Amaya, Anushka, Ellie, Rachel, Samantha, Aaron, Philip, Yueling, Seva, Josh, Madeline, Polina, Ananya, Samarina, Stella, Nova, Catherine, Liesl
Conner Bassett
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #62: Spring
An update from our sixty-second Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, April 1 The workshop started with Conner showing us four paintings that all involved some element of spring—glee, excitement, flowers, calm, peace, etc. Before we began to read some examples of poetry about spring, we asked ourselves what we think of when we think of spring. We summed up our ideas in a list that included hopefulness, warmth, and brightness. Then we read “After the Winter” by Claude McKay. It incorporated rhyme, imagery, and musical language to convey a feeling of spring. The next poem, “In Just” by E.E. Cummings was similar—it was fast, fun to read, and felt free and excited. We looked at two more spring paintings, both of them very peaceful. This is how most people think of spring. However, the three poems we looked at next were very different. In the first section of “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot called “Burial of the Dead,” April is referred to as “the cruelest month,” while in “In Perpetual Spring” by Amy Gerstler, a garden is portrayed as “a good place to sulk.” In “May” by Jonathan Galassi, there is a disgusting description of rotting leaves. All of these poems describe spring in a negative way—plants sprouting from the ground like zombies, puddles of mud, flowers with thorns. We then listened to twos songs—“Spring” by Antonio Vivaldi, which offers a lively picture of spring, and “The Rite of Spring” by Igor Stravinsky, which shows a different side of it. The Challenge: Write a poem about spring. The Participants: Emma, Amaya, Samarina, Stella, Sarah, Lilian, Rachel, Polina, Aarush, Lucy, Nysa, Anika, Amelia, Daniel, Lindsay, Anushka, Miya, Nathan, Aaron, Yueling, Lina, Eric, Anna, Georgia, Jacey, Alice, Seva, Madeline
How Stories Work—Writing Workshop #60: Tongue Twisters
An update from our sixtieth Writing Workshop with Conner Bassett A summary of the workshop held on Saturday, March 18 Conner began by asking the question, “What is the purpose of language?” Some of the answers were to communicate and to represent or describe things. Throughout the workshop, we learned more about what language is really meant for, especially in stories and poems. The presentation started with some traditional examples of tongue twisters, such as “she sells seashells by the seashore” and “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” Next, we began to look at examples of tongue twisters in literature. The three examples we read were “A Mown Lawn” by Lydia Davis, “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, and “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité. “A Mown Lawn,” a work of flash fiction, played with the words “mown lawn,” rearranging letters and making readers think of the term in a completely different way. “Jabberwocky,” Conner told us, is a poem “obsessed with language,” paying attention to the sounds of the words rather than what they meant, even incorporating some made up words. “The Chaos” uses many different elements of poetry, such as rhyme and assonance, and is about the English language itself, explaining the many contradicting rules and finally informing the reader to “give it up.” We concluded that there are many differences between the tongue twisters we looked at earlier and these three pieces. The latter are actually somewhat harder to read, and “the point is the sounds, not the words.” The Challenge: Write a story using the techniques found in tongue twisters. The Participants: Emma, Ava, Stella, Sarah, Catherine, Lucy, Katelyn, Anushka, Aarush, Amaya, Yueling, Arjun, Georgia, Madeline, Lina, Josh, Seva, Ananya, Samarina
