Write Where You Are

Summer 2013 quarter

Faculty

Anne de Marcken (Forbes) creative writing, moving-image media

Fields of Study

community studies and writing

Description

If you live in a place - any place, city or country - long enough and deeply enough you can learn anything, the dynamics and interconnections that exist in every community, be it plant, human, or animal - you can learn what a writer needs to know.
    - Gretel Erlich

Professor of social and cultural geography Tim Cresswell calls place, "not just a thing in the world but a way of understanding the world."  Using writing as a creative/critical mode of inquiry, and working in a variety of traditional, innovative and hyrbid forms, members of this program will investigate this place—Olympia—in an effort to come to a more nuanced and complex understanding of our world and perhaps themselves and one another. Students will participate in intensive critique sessions and seminars on critical and literary texts and screenings, will conduct research into the nature of place and into Olympia's cultural and natural history, will go on writing/research field trips around the Olympia area, will experiment and gain skill with the elements of narrative and lyrical discourse, and will cultivate the makings of a sustaining and sustainable creative practice.

Members of this program will spend extensive time in the field. We will experiment with different ways of getting from place to place and different ways of experiencing place that are both defamiliarizing and connection-forming. Students may have the opportunity to work in multidisciplinary and experimental literary forms depending upon the skill-level and interest of program participants.

Advertised Schedule

10a-4p Tue/Wed (Jun. 25 - Jul. 24) plus field trips (dates TBA)

Location

Olympia

Online Learning

Enhanced Online Learning

Books

Greener Store

Offered During

Day