ACTIVITY: Found Writing Using Word Strips

Today, I brought some glue sticks and a large collection of word strips--pages of text that had been cut into their individual lines of text. After sifting through them, club members assembled the word strips into visual word collages.

Tami asked how long it took to cut all the paper because, like the computer in "EPICAC" by Kurt Vonnegut, I had brought enough word strips "for the next 500 years." I explained that it was something that a few other teachers and former students worked on many years ago when we had had some free time.

Take a look at our of the results below...

Make the opening of your speech lively--

She interviewed the scientists and included them in her film.
he saw fascinating renewable energy installations, but also oil spills,
Yet for some reason, the people who have earned our patience
can't be flown out until
the center of the Milky Way.

Watching an entire island melt in a way that is unprecedented makes you
need it.

Can I see you again?

Astronomers have a long wait--

What's wrong with me?
We have no real social contract with them.
That constitutes a higher form
It's settling out in the ocean

ACTIVITY: List Images w/ Colors

This week, Creative Writing Club members made lists. Imagery is at the heart of good poetry, and making lists of random images often produces surprising results. Also, trying to find a way to look at the things around us--things that, perhaps, on a daily basis, we don't notice too closely--might help us make some kind of discovery about where we can find images and about how to arrange them.

To construct our lists, we walked around the LAS Building and wrote down what we saw. We imposed the constraint of including a color in every observation that we added to our lists. For additional effect, some of us included pictures of our observations.

Read some of our results below...

one black sign and one yellow one across from each other

each blue stair up to the next floor
Yousef's yellow binder
green grass on the other side of the window
a black and yellow pencil
a red mop bucket
some leaves on the dying plant
a picture of a pink crab who is saying,
"Hi! I'm a Crab!"
prayer times in purple
a silver column that reflects everything
the white table with one white paper on it
a package of gold and red Camel cashews
a turquoise button on a power strip
all these flags with white stars and stripes
a red light eyeing me from the wall near the elevator
a silver key
a cream couch that nobody uses

ACTIVITY: Found Poetry using Anaphora

Today's writing activity emphasized a process.

Each line of your response should begin with "Start with...". In the library, choose a book, go to a specific page, go down to a specific line, and record words from that line. Repeat the same process using a different book. List of as many as possible. The results are your found poem.

For example, I chose to use expressions, phrases and words from page sixteen and line 17 of each book that I selected.

ACTIVITY: Spaghetti Strip Found Poems

Magazine articles were cut into word strips. Club members took handfuls of word strips and arranged them into spaghetti strip found poems. See there results below...

Words were taken from National Geographic magazine articles from October 2016 through June 2016.

The Book offered few clues

ACTIVITY: Ten by 10 by X by

Start at a book in the library. Turn to the tenth page. Count down to the tenth line and copy down the line and the source. Repeat the process ten times.

When finished, use the words as your "word bank" and collage something together.

1687

telling was a White European other story

falling into college

working to protect his colleagues
poor women and children of labouring classes
presented the great black circle route besides which war effort

therefore their test scores were collected, published, aired on television
part business temple

among magnificent faces

being taken from Turks

fishing in battle

--
Sources
The Freud Reader - edited by Peter Gay; Am I OK? - Carol C. Nadelson; Stereotypes and Prejudice - edited by Charles Stengor; The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould; Critical Thinking: Building the Basics - Timothy L. Walter, Glenn M Knudsuig, Donald E.P. Smith; Modern Historiography - Michael Bentley; With Courage and Common Sense - edited by Susan Wittig Albert and Dayna Finet.

Write a List Poem

Creative Writing Club members wandered around the LAS Building and made a list of words that they encountered on signs around the building.

Compose an Erasure

1) Find an article in a magazine.
2) Obscure irrelevant words (or leave important words uncovered).
3) Combine with an image.
4) Cite your sources beneath your image.

Fatma's Erasure

Writing Shapes

The Creative Writing Club members met today and, after a conversation about using Blogger to post our weekly responses, we got started.

We walked around the upper floor of the Learning Resource Center (LRC) and recorded different shapes that we observed. This is a found or conceptual writing technique that emphasizes a process through which imagery may be captured. It was an attempt to see the familiar from a different perspective.

The response pictured here shows Amera Jama's application of our writing activity.