Not that there are likely many of you out there, it being July and all. But if there are, then damn, what're you doing here? I haven't posted since May!
I have sort of been doing stuff with my summer, though. For the past two years, I've taken a class at the University of Utah ("the U") called Seize the Story. The first year, it was just amazing. It was a week of really intensive writing projects - but nothing too overwhelming - and local authors came and talked to us, and we got free food at the student union building, and we each made like twelve new writer friends, which was absolutely great. The second year was decidedly less great in comparison, seeing how we had a different instructor and no TA (we'd also had this really cool TA, Kate Coursey). We didn't really learn anything that year, and there was lots of the instructor just rambling about nothing, and no author visited. But we still made a bunch of new writer friends, and still wished that that class could just be what school was like, because sitting around working with this huge group of other dedicated writers is so refreshing that you'll never forget it.
This summer, however, I made a mistake.
I didn't sign up for Seize the Story this year. It had the bad instructor again, and none of my friends would be taking it with me. And there was this other class, "Intensive Creative Writing," which was four weeks long instead of just one, and costed a hundred dollars less. It even offered a 0.5 high school English credit, if I wanted it. It started only a few days after the last day of school, which sort of sucked, but I did it anyway.
And wasted the first month of my summer on it.
If I'd thought the Seize the Story instructor was useless, this instructor may not have even been there. But then she got mad at us when we didn't pay perfect attention. She got sick of us after the first two weeks. (I feel so sorry for those poor Granite School District kids who get her for the whole year.) Even though she got tired, she was still mostly nice, but because the class offered a high school credit, she had to follow the Utah Common Core in what she taught us. For those of you who don't know, the Common Core is basically an outline of what the state of Utah deems necessary for a school to teach us. So this class was wasted on bullshitting our way through everything to simple sentence structure ("what is a noun, everybody?") to essays (she didn't give us an actual type of essay, but I wrote what she called a "humorous argumentative" on why local coffee chains are better than Starbucks - maybe I'll post it someday) to poetry units wasted on soulless "I Am" poems, which she said she hated herself, but saw no problem in assigning to us anyway.
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| This is an "I Am" poem. (courtesy of: docstoc.com) |
The other shitty thing about this class offering a credit was that nearly all the kids in there were only taking it to get one. The instructor's daughter came in at one point to give us a brief overview on how journalism works, and she asked how many of us wanted to pursue a writing-related career. While at Seize the Story it would have been the entire class of sixteen minus maybe one, here in a class of eighteen, there were only four kids (including me). One was a super-introvert and the other was generally pretty rude, (and the third was my girlfriend - God knows if she'll ever revisit her blog though), so unfortunately, no new writer friends were made.
The one good thing that came of this class was a free-verse poem called Meliorism that I wrote the night before the last day because I knew we'd be having a class-wide poetry reading, and then a party. (Scratch that, there were two good things; at the party, I learned to play poker.) The poem sort of needs to be read aloud though, so I'll post that soon.
Wow. Superlong posts are sort of my forte, aren't they? But I have one more subject to cover before I go.
This blog will only be mostly dormant this summer! That is because of my lovely new reading assignment. Okay, it's not really new; it's been a couple months. But it's new to you! Andbutso, this summer, I'm supposed to be reading and annotating The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande, and I need to collect five "artifacts." Artifacts are basically real-world things I've noticed (news stories, advertisements, all that jazz) that relate to the ideas of the book. I'll need to blog about them here. So, now that you know about my new project, and seeing how I'm already over a third of the way through summer, I'd better get to that. I'll see you guys later.
Thanks,
- Allie H-S
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