1-Credit Workshop: Writing as Social Practice

Open to WSU students

One of the ideas behind this course taught by C.S. Giscombe is that poetry and essays (life-writing, creative nonfiction, “essaying,” etc.) have similar aims or field-marks—both are literary vehicles of exploration and documentation, both value experimental approaches, and both traffic with versions of the incomplete. Another idea is that various wide particulars make up each of us—social class, race, ability, gender, place of birth, etc. These particulars endow us with privileges, deficits, blindnesses, insights, and the like. Prompts in this course will encourage students to document these and explore how they qualify us (and how or if they obligate us) to “speak” from various positions. The purpose of writing in this course is to engage public language on the one hand and personal (meaning specific) observations and experiences on the other. The purpose here is to pursue consciousness. The experiment is to attempt to do so in the forms of poetry and the personal essay. A third idea is that hybrid forms—works that defy a single characterization or order, works that join rather than exclude—are of great interest. March 22–24, 6:00–8:30 p.m. To register, contact Leisa McCormick at lmccormick@wsu.edu or 509‑335‑0496.