Final Projects

FINAL PROJECTS

1. In lieu of a final portfolio, I’ve decided to set aside time & space for your extended attention to a single creative writing project in the genre or cross-genre of your choice. You may begin a new project or return to pieces already begun in this course – the direction you take is entirely up to you, as long as your project challenges you to grow as a writer. It must be substantial and important to you; something that stretches your range and reach. It must be complete and ambitious and carefully revised (as much as can be expected in the brief time that remains). Any genre is open to you, including multi-media work crossing the arts and genres, or cross-disciplinary work, as long as your project significantly involves text. You will present and post your project for credit.
   • Some Possibilities:
     • Write a new, longer, extended piece of nonfiction or fiction. Or, recast a flash prose of nonfiction or fiction into a longer essay/story.
     • Take 2 brief, specific scenes from anything you’ve written in nonfiction, fiction, or poetry and juxtapose, overlap, or link them into 1 essay/story/long poem, threading them into a cohesive piece. Feel free to intersperse and connect 2 pieces across genres too.
     • Write a series of connected flash fictions or nonfiction shorts or brief poems or cross-genre pieces.
     • Write a work of creative nonfiction or poetry that includes visual media, photographs, or other artwork.
     • Create a 3-minute digital story version of an essay, story, or poem, using sound, image, and voiceover.
     • Write a brief collection of poems. Here, you can explore a mix of different styles, or focus on a singular project of consistent forms (a cycle of sonnets, a sequence of prose poems, etc.). 
     • Create a visual piece of art with accompanying text.
     • Write a brief script for stage or screen.
     • Create a slam poetry performance.
     • Other ideas…? Run with them.
2. Final Self-Reflection: Revisit your Didion-inspired “Why I Write” letter from the beginning of the semester, and think about where you are now in relation to when you wrote each of these pieces as they represented/represent yourself as a writer. Consider the ways in which you’ve set out to achieve (and have achieved) your goals from the moment you signed up for this course to the first days of this course, throughout the semester in creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry units. Revisit the goals you wrote down in your notebook early on. Reflect on your growth, changes, and discoveries about your own writing and your writing habit, about reading as a writer, about storytelling and poem-making and the labor and craft of language. Discuss how you’ve created a writing habit and practice. Address how you’ll continue to approach writing, beyond this classroom. What goals do you continue to have for yourself as a writer looking ahead? Which writers in each of the genres have most influenced your work? Which writing exercises and assignments have been useful? Which genre(s) do you favor? Which genre(s) will you keep writing? If you entered the course as a self-identifying “poet” or “fiction writer,” how did it feel to cross genres, and did you discover hidden talents in yourself; did one genre have benefits on another genre in your writing? For example, did writing poetry sharpen your prose, or do you think it will have an effect when you return to prose? How did you settle on a final project, why did this project compel you, what did you learn in the process? How have you learned to be a reader of your own writing? How have you learned to make revisions objectively and effectively? What have your strengths and weakness been throughout the semester and how have you worked them out /focused on them? Where will you go from here in your writing? Tell me everything… (Select and post some of these reflections on our class website under “Final Reflections.”)
3. Grade Proposal: What grade do you think you deserve for this course, and why?