New Semester, New Class of Advanced Creative Writers

This semester I've assigned a totally new book: Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. By Virginia Tufte, it was strongly recommended to me last summer, and I thought it would be a strange but fun treat for the class. Advanced writing classes are good places to examine the sentence, the basic unit of communication.

Besides ughs, grunts, and eye-rolls, that is.

And besides gerund-filled invective and hair-twirling.

So, let's call it one of our basic units of communication. Fine. Still, in a creative writing class, it's pretty crucial to truck in sentences. Better still is the ability to really manipulate them. We want to know when a short, emphatic sentence is going to give a kick to the paragraph, or if the form is just going to belabor a point already made. Will a winding, langorous Henry James-ish sentence seduce your reader into the narrative scene or will it merely make her impatient for the point (or the period)? These choices are generally unconscious for writers, at least at first, and they remain largely unconscious for me. Yet our ability to think about them surely enlarges the project here, this semester. This semester we'll take a step back from the sentence, and from our sentences in particular, to see what they are doing for our work as a whole and to learn what a few alterations and adjustments might do.

Teaching Art

First, it's impossible. And often terribly insulting, condescending, and especially unwittingly condescending (my specialty). (Due to the many years of teaching art, of course.)

But that doesn't mean that the students enrolled in English 332 (Advanced Creative Writing) won't be learning a thing or two about art while in my vicinity in the next four months. But mostly they'll learn it out of my vicinity. Mostly they'll learn it by realizing they already know it. Buried somewhere in their noggins. Art and the old longing for more more more of it, dangit.

This is not my point.

My point is that classes start tomorrow, that the students will be advanced, that I want to lead them into the great world of their own art, their own generation, and so I am going to demand that they set up a blog. Each one of them. A weekly assignment about art -- about their art -- or just about art as they understand it. As their understanding enlarges. And I will keep up with them, a little loveletter here which is easier than posting on ab chaos lex.com and which will--may--will--may enlarge my own understanding of the process.

I am looking at my syllabus: Should I post it here? On the web?

My favorite line: Attendance and attitude are key to learning!

As if!

More will be revealed.