Wednesday, May 21, 2008

logistic problems

I am trying to prepare my first lesson for the Intro to Creative Writing Workshop I am teaching, which starts next week! I am very excited about doing it, and hope to write all the exercises along with the students, though they won't see what I write because I don't show my drafts to anyone, never mind beginning writing students! Every once in a while a miracle happens and a fully formed poem (or almost fully formed) springs from my brow like Athena on caffeine, but needless to say, that doesn't happen too often.
For this lesson, I am trying to scan the drawings from a children's picture book, Zoom, into my thumb drive so I can build an introduction to the class around it. I would have preferred a video of Zoom from the old Sesame Street show, but I can't find one online anywhere. I'll Google it again or check out YouTube and see if I missed one. My scanner doesn't work too well, and I know that I will end up wanting to throw the computer across the room after too long.
Zoom, for those of you who don't know it, is a wonderful conceptual picture book that starts with what looks like an abstract zig-zaggy red design that, in the next page, turns out to be the comb on a rooster's head. As the pictures go on, the "camera" of the artist's eye backs up and up and up, so that the rooster becomes part of a scene from a window two farm children are looking at, which becomes a toy village a girl is playing with, which becomes a picture on a magazine someone on a cruise ship is reading, which becomes an advertisement for the cruiseline on a passing bus... you get the idea. My assertion will be that writing is rather like this... I am starting out having them read a narrative by William Carlos Williams, "The Use of Force," about his doctoring experience tussling with a little girl with a deadly secret. I will have them write their own short narratives about an experience they had, and in the next week, they will look at an experience from the perspective of someone not themselves. The idea is to get them used to becoming the roving eye of the camera, like the perspective of the person who drew Zoom. It's not a bad metaphor for fiction--pretending to see from an impossible perspective, a perspective not one's own, and it will catch their fancies, I hope, if I can figure out how to do it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Delightful! Were I a student in your class, I would love this assignment.

Robbi N. said...

Thanks Lou! I'm trying to scan that book, though I know it's not exactly legal. I won't be handing out copies or anything. I will take it to campus because a student accidentally didn't hand in her revised paper and I have to do a change of grade form now! So I'll scan it with the guys at the tech services office, probably faster than I could do it at home, and make a Powerpoint show out of it.