A Great October Class

I thoroughly enjoyed the October "Short Forms" class I taught. This was the first of my independent online writing classes that I taught where the assignments were designed to work for writing poetry or prose, rather than just poetry. I think that opening up the assignments in this way was a good fit for me as an instructor and for offering greater flexibility for students in terms of being able to use the class as a springboard to write what they wanted to write.

At first I was thinking I could do another class running from mid-November to mid-December, but now I'm thinking that January would be a better time. I have an idea for the next class where it would also allow for both poetry and prose writing--and it would have a visual art component. The class would focus on exploring images. It would mostly be writing, but then we'd also do a piece where we worked with words in a visual way (like making cut-ups). And I'm mulling around a collage assignment, too.

I've mostly been doing work-related writing lately rather than creative writing, but so it goes. I've been reading Cornelius Eady's collected poems (he has a great poem about John Henry's hammer that I hope to develop an assignment around one day), and I've also been reading a nonfiction book called Rebounders which tells stories of people whose careers developed through a series of twists and turns--like the founder of Pandora, who started out as a mostly unknown musician. I always feel better to be reading!