Creative Writing Class Assignments
For this post I’m going to do something a little different.
I’ve recently completed the winter 2023 semester at my university. One of the courses I took was a creative writing class, taught by the Canadian-American poet/author Damian Rogers. I thought this would be a great opportunity to share some of the work that I did throughout the semester.
The first half of the course was dedicated to writing in prose. One of the major assignments for this unit was a portfolio of relatively short prose entries made in response to various writing prompts. I had a lot of fun with many of the prompts and it provided me with a great opportunity to play around with writing styles. You can read it here.
Another major assignment that followed was a short story which we would spend several weeks revising and editing in class. I expanded upon one of the writing prompts we received, which asked us to take a historical figure and recontextualize them into a modern setting. My final product was a piece I titled Freud’s Commute (see my previous blog post to understand my baseless obsession with Sigmund Freud).
The second unit was dedicated to poetry. Like the first unit, we had a portfolio assignment based on a bunch of creative prompts, but for poetry instead of prose. I wrote a lot of poetry back in high school, but switched to larger works of prose over the past few years. I really enjoyed reviving this hobby of mine from years ago. You can read it here.
The final assignment was to take two poems from our portfolio and revise them extensively, similar to the short story from the prose unit. The first poem I chose to revise was That Which Gives Me Goosebumps, a list-style poem inspired by the work of Sei Shonagan. I chose this one because I felt it had the most opportunity for improvement. The second one I chose was Fuck You Postmodernism, which I chose because I had a lot of fun writing it.
None of these are completely refined works and I won’t be trying to publish them anytime soon, but I definitely enjoyed writing them, especially in an academic setting.
