Week 2

We start our second week and I'm excited.  I see before us an incredible landscape of possibility and wonder.  The week will be one where we continue developing our theater skits and also begin to perform them in class.  Many of you will be extremely nervous as you get up in front of class and "perform."  If this is your case, don't forget that you will not die because of it, and feeling scared is part of being human.  These playful moments offer us rich experiences; pay attention to how you handle yourself. Write about these feelings in your journal.

This second week also marks a turn toward our writer's notebook.  Please take a moment to learn more about this tool and how you should start using it.  We will be writing our first formal essay in a couple of weeks; the notebook should be your workshop, a place where you try out what you want to say.

Remember that I mentioned last week that this class will focus primarily on the personal essay.  For now we will be telling lots of personal stories, trying to find our voice and honoring the details of our lives, how we got to where we are being who we are.  With that in mind, I'll start that process.  This piece is part of a longer text I'm working on but have not finished.  I offer it as way to let you in on my own process of expressing myself and encouraging all of us to keep wrestling with what needs to be said out loud.

In class this week we will take time to discuss Jensen's "Who Are You?"  We will break up into our skit groups and use our notebooks to respond to some probing questions. 

We will also start performing the theater pieces.  For these to work, the audience needs to take a very active role.  Remember that the second time the performance is done, you will need to intervene in order to transform the negative results of the original storyline into something more satisfying.

One more thing, read "Fighting Tofu" in Writing Down the Bones.  Commit to one of the six tricks Goldberg offers.  Write about it in your notebook.  Did you know you are a writer?