AND ACTIVITIES FOR WEEK 1.

You have undoubtedly noticed that this week's readings from both the Burroway and Root texts focus on the varieties of processes that writers engage in when producing their work. You are now thinking about your own processes, and identifying more with some writers in these chapters than with others. For your first posting to our group email list, respond in writing to one of the following queries:

1. Do you, like Donald Murray, find that you work on several writing projects simultaneously? Why does this method work for you? What projects are you working on now? Or, what projects would you like to work on this semester? Do you prefer working on only one project? Why?

2. Do you agree with Patricia Hampl that the line between fiction and creative nonfiction often blurs? Is writing easier for you when you draw entirely from your imagination, or do you prefer the seed of a created work to be something that has actually happened to you, to someone you know, or to someone in history? Share a writing experience that supports your opinion.

3. What do you think Patricia Hampl means when she writes: "If we refuse to do the work of remembering, others will do it for us?"

4. In what respects does Annie Dillard's essay "Living Like Weasels" read like poetry? In what respects does it read like fiction?

5. (From Burroway page 27: Discussion Question number 1: Bonnie Friedman takes a "just do it" approach to writing, while Annie Dillard stresses the difficulty and intensity of the work. Which writer most accurately describes your own process?

6. (Burroway, Discussion question 2: What insights into the writing process surprised you? Discouraged you? Made you want to get to work?

For your first ten-point writing exercise which you will email directly to me, complete any one of the Burroway Writing Assignments on page 28, or any one of the following exercises:

1. (This is a take-off on Claudia Johnson's advice to her students: Free-write for five minutes on one of the following questions: What makes you angry? Of what are you afraid? What do you want? What really changed you? Who really changed you? Then expand one idea from your free-write into a full page of narrative. Don't worry right now about organization or perfect grammar; go for flow. Here is my example:

Of what am I afraid? Trigonometry and Calculus. I'm afraid of walking on deserted city streets too late at night. I am afraid of joggers who approach me suddenly without speaking. I'm afraid of my mother's death. I'm afraid of everyone I know dying so that I have no verification really, no witness, to my own life. When I was little, I feared the rattling noises our furnace made, and I feared the well pump at our Lake Erie cottage. I was also afraid of being alone in the back seat of cars.

Expanded, focused version:
My fear of mechanized sound and motion began when I was only two years old. Our family owned a cottage at Lake Erie's Bull Harbor in Monroe Michigan. This cottage acted for me as mother and teacher to all my senses. Its air smelled of wood smoke, cantaloupe, sunlit water, coffee, sand, and sulfur -the sulfur being from the hard-water well. The cottage fed my ears with shoreline swishing breakers, the calls of Purple Martins that sounded as if someone were pouring water, the rusty screen door hinge squeak made by CowBirds, and August's whining locusts. I was never alone there, but always bundled in among cousins quarreling over who would sleep on the screened porch and who in the two bedrooms, who had rights to fish line and who to the canoe. Life here felt solid, from wood floors, to cement docs, to buoying water. Yet hidden beneath the log bathroom was a beast with power to change all this: an electric pump that drew water from our sulphurous well. This pump whenever it kicked on, caused the entire cottage to vibrate as though in an earthquake, or in an automobile headed downhill. My mother reports that even as a swaddled baby, I would scream hysterically whenever the pump went on, forcing her to place my bassinet in the kitchen or livingroom, furthest from its malign life. Perhaps the fact hat I was blind and thus unable to find the source of my fear, enhanced it. Perhaps the fact that it dwelt in the lower ranges of sound scared me. One thing I do know is that I believed this sound and this vibration to be alive, and that even returning to the cottage as an adult, I could not prevent my stomach from quivering when it again started the whole place moving. Odder still is the fact that even as an adult I have generalized my fear of the sound, so that I am often internally startle by Xerox machines, furnaces, fans, and dish washers when they first turn on, startled that is, until I identify with certainty, their source.

2. Write down the facts from the first seven years of your life, grouping them into three categories: external events, people, and internal life. Then ask yourself which facts still remain as unfinished business in your life. Write a focused paragraph on one such source of unfinished business. Note that this exercise can be the basis for a story, familiar essay, or poem.

3. Cluster or develop a list from one of the following prompts:
Things I wish had never been said; things more embarrassing than nudity; red things; things to die for; things to live for; loud things. Then, either arrange your cluster or list as a "found" poem letting free association determine its order, or choose one item from your list and develop it into a focus paragraph.

5. For five consecutive mornings, write for ten minutes immediately upon waking. The idea here is to allow your brain, still half asleep, to point you toward writing subjects that you might not consider once the day's consciousness sets in. After five days, choose what you consider the best of your free-writes, and hand them in. Here's my example:

Mon. Jan. 25, 1999. My sleep was haunted again last night. I woke during one of those externally silent hours -two or three A.M- the hour when sonic freeway rumbles leave our ears' range, the hour when surface streets are still enough to hear residual nature: a bird adjusting feathered sleep posture in the back yucca tree, or maybe silence itself. Last night was different. A spatter of rain had begun rattling the back tarpaulins covering summer lawn furniture, but in my half sleep I wasn't sure what the sound was exactly. I'd been dreaming of a friend I'd lost touch with for nineteen years, and in my dream she was everybody I'd ever neglected, every anxiety I'd ever let wander: my parrot's current illness that we can't diagnose, my dog Kelsey's messages about her aging body -skin tumors and tiny lumps- my visiting aunt from Wisconsin with whom I've spent too little time... the unexplained pet tortoise who came and went rom our lives in 1963.. yesterday's five Canadian geese drawn by memory through our suburban life, tumbling, touching, brushing each other's wing tips as they flew. If I knew what they knew. There's a message there, one I must read! Awake now, I know I'll be all right with this day. I'll meet each detail as it comes, one at a time, living ferociously in the present But there's unfinished wild business here in the night hours, endangered species of the heart that need protecting.

5. Write about an incongruity, a Catch Twenty-two dilemma, or an unlikely connection.

If there is one idea I'd like everyone to absorb from this week's study, it's that if you are going to write well, you need to cultivate a habit of writing. Start now!

SOME FINAL NOTES, AND SOME COMMENTS ON COURSE RATIONALE
Bonnie Friedman's essay "Message From A Cloud of Flies: ON Distraction" is taken from her book Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas In The Writer's Life. It's published by Harper Collins, and is divided into the following eight chapters; "Envy: The Writer's Disease," "Message From A Cloud of Flies: On Distraction," "Your Mother's Passions, Your Sister's Woes: Writing About The Living," "The Paraffin Density of Wax Wings Writing School," "The Wild, Yellow, Circling Beast: Writing From The Inside," "The Story's Body": How To Get The Meaning In," "Anorexia of Language: Why We Can't Write," "Glittering Icons, Lush Orchards: On Success." By good fortune I was given this book by a friend about a week ago, and am really enjoying it. Of course Friedman is not the only writer to address writer's silence and writer's block. Writer and political activist Tillie Olson addressed it in an essay called "Silences: Why Writers Don't Write. In that essay, she expresses particular concern about the silences of women authors. So does Virginia Woolf in her famous piece "A Room of One's Own." Nina Holzer writes an inspiring treatise on the aesthetic and spiritual values of journal-keeping called A Walk Between Heaven and Earth: A Journal On The Creative Process. I also recommend Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, and Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, and Wild Mind. Other finds to stimulate your writing process include Gabriel Rico's Writing The Natural Way, and Peter Elbow's Writing With Power. A write-up on any of the books listed here will definitely fulfill the "review of a source for writers" assignment that you need to complete for this class. I'll update you with more sources, both print and electronic, as our course progresses. And not all will be on process. Some will treat technique, others publication, others genre.

Let me sign off with a few thoughts about our course texts and workload. Between them, the texts cover an enormous breadth of material, which, combined with the course writing requirements might overwhelm in both the joyous and terrifying sense of that word. Relax! Let me reiterate something I wrote in your syllabus: The books are here to support your writing, not the other way around. Depending upon whether you're more interested in fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, you'll gravitate more toward one text than any other, and devote more time to writing assignments inspired by that text and that genre. This is fine! Think of the creative writing class as a buffet: I'd like you to taste everything, but I'm expecting that you'll have food preferences, and fill your plate accordingly. Remember too that our on-line experience is alive and evolving, and our scheduled discussion and writing topics are not cast in stone. If you want to spend more time discussing climate control in fiction, and doing so means tweaking our schedule a bit, so be it. Just because the "Aerial Reconnaissance" essay in your Root text isn't required reading in our syllabus, doesn't mean we can't discuss it if it inspires you. I designed this syllabus to get us started, but I'm relying on your writing, interests, and needs to help us bend our course in a direction that benefits us all.

Cordially,
Susan Schulter