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| Photo by Zara Rafferty |
It never rains but it pours, I am here to tell you.
It’s been awhile since I put on my writer’s pants, pictured at left, and headed out into the world. But I’ve got three such events scheduled in under a week.
This coming Sunday, May 26th, I will be reading at the Elora Writers Festival in the afternoon, and then zipping back to Kitchener for the KW Arts Awards that same evening. (I wonder whether that latter event calls for something fancier than pants?)
Just a few days later, on Friday May 31st, I’ll be hosting a reading at Words Worth Books in Waterloo (FictionKNITsta! they are calling it, and I will have to figure out how to pronounce that out loud, seeing as I’m the host!).
All events are open to everyone, and I hope to see some friendly faces out there. See posters below for more info.
In further writing news, not necessarily involving my writing pants, I am now preparing to teach a creative writing course at the University of Waterloo this fall. As I put together a syllabus with — hopefully — reasonable expectations for both students and self, I find myself gathering helpful hints. For example, a Facebook friend recently posted that she gives her creative writing students a strict 1000-word limit for projects, because that’s plenty of wordage in which to tell whether or not a project is working, and it also encourages tighter editing. And she has only so much time.
Further suggestions and tips are most welcome.
Here’s the course calendar description, which I did not write: “Creative Writing 1 – Aimed at encouraging students to develop their creative and critical potentials, the course consists of supervised practice, tutorials, and seminar discussions.”
In short, it’s a workshop setting, with a limited number of students, and the direction of how it will be structured is entirely up to me, and my somewhat frighteningly ambitious instincts.
Yay! Exciting writing times, Ms. Fancy Pants! Will be trying to make it out for sure! 🙂
I’d suggest being really clear about your policy on late assignments and email contact (what you will engage in over email).
I’d also suggest have each of them read a contemporary short story collection and give a 10-15 minute talk about it. I know when I first started writing, I hadn’t been exposed to enough great contemporary writing.
Congrats on the creative writing class! I taught one once to high schoolers. It was tremendous fun, but I’m sure college students will be better suited for it. I recall that I attempted to write every assignment I gave to the kids, in order to show them the process and that I could poorly and well at times. I was frank that I could not grade or even read everything they wrote for the class, but that it was the amount of writing that was developing their craft.
Very exciting! Congratulations!