creative writing camp

Working with a budding writer at WordSparks Camp.

Cut, paste, write!

Salem Times Register intern Stephanie Floyd just posted on Facebook some of the photos she took at WordSparks on Tuesday. With her permission, I am posting them here. For our collage project, we made word/image collages with a center word and four corner words. After creating sentences that connected the central word with the corner words, we used those sentences as the springboard for a story. When we didn’t know where to go in our stories, we let the pictures guide us to our next idea.

All photos below are the property of Stephanie Floyd / Salem Times Register. Here we are working on our collages, reading our stories, and playing some games.

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Magnetic Poetry / WordSparks

I just finished up leading WordSparks Creative Writing Camp, so this week I’ll be sharing some pics and tid-bits from the camp. It was a great experience; I  made some new friends and had a blast sharing writing with young people in my community. Who could ask for more?!

Monday: I didn’t take many photos on Monday since we were all just getting to know one another–and nothing quite says “eek!” like having a camera put in your face by an unfamiliar adult. That said, we got to know each other pretty quickly. We played some games, made some art, read some poetry together and wrote some of our own.

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Isabelle leads the morning group in an ice-breaker game

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From Monday’s “Six Ways of Seeing” exercise. A camper brought her finished work (six visions of an old-time radio) back the next day. Later we read Wallace Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and wrote our own “Seeing Again” stories and poems.

Tuesday: We had fun with collage, blackout poem, and magnetic poetry. Here are some of the magnetic poems we came up with. (I haven’t credited these, as some were written in groups and some by individuals, and I didn’t want to leave anyone out by accident. I’m halfway sure, though, that the first two come from Caleb, the third is by Harrison and Howard,  and the last one from Laura.)

I love the enthusiasm of these two. Managers everywhere would do well to keep these in mind:

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Love the surprise at the end:

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Oooh, dark! Also, why more than one heart? Intriguing!

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This one is so wise… beautiful!

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Check us out later this week for more about the week at WordSparks, including Green Man and Woman masks, self-portraits, and bleach t-shirts.

Blackout Poem / “Before I Went Away” (Does it matter if I’m making sense?)

Here’s another blackout poem, this one from page 5 of “The Beauty’s Daughter.”

Since I’m not sure it makes sense without more punctuation, here’s a transcription:

Before I Went Away

She had never known the true name.
There is no need for thinking, my sister.

When it was necessary to utter lies,
the truth allowed her to call herself

anyone: your sister,
his voice, his ancestry, eyes,

a compliment, her teachers,
their pupils, her friends,

such words.

~

Now, having typed it out, it still doesn’t exactly make sense. But that’s ok with me. A blackout poem isn’t so much as creating literal sense as it is finding an emotional cadence, right? (And yes, I’m aware the words “emotional cadence” probably don’t make sense to anyone but me.)

The kids, hubby and I just finished listening to an audio version of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and I’m reminded of a great line from the immortal Willy Wonka:

A little nonsense now and then
is relished by the wisest men.

That said, I don’t think my nonsense makes me wise, but it does make me happy.

Blackout Poem / The Beauty’s Daughter

In a week or so (July 15-19), I’ll be heading up WordSparks, a creative writing camp, and I’ve picked up a great pile of books for us to use for blackout poems, collage and such. I’ve had a few more people sign up (spaces are still available — you can register here), so I may need to take another trip through the library discards and see what I can come up with.

Books

I think I may have trouble parting with How to Prepare Your Own High-Intensity Resume. It is so high intensity!

Here’s “Some Book of Poems She Had Yet To Complete,” a little blackout poem I wrote from page 3 of a book called The Beauty’s Daughter by Monette Cummings whic I picked up at the library sale for a quarter. While part of me is squeamish about messing with a book (books are sacred!), part of me is wondering if I can fill the whole book with blackouts (bad me!).

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