Prompt Writing--Intangible

Hey guys, sorry for this belated entry on our collective prompt writing. Coming from outside the country, I think I'm more than lucky to get participated in all the inspirational activities so far . It's a lot of fun to see the infiniteness of possibilities when our imagination are ignited by our peers in the writing relay race( if the term is legible).

Ok I'll save my wordiness for the next meeting. Below is the story contrived by the six of us:

Intangible

I want to capture air in photographs. I want to sew laughter to my skirt. I want to bring the scent of my flowers in my pocket.

Being able to touch me doesn’t mean we are close.I sometimes think that it would be easier to let go of such memories of you and I, sitting at the ends of the world.Cyberspace draws us nearer, but really, the closer we are, the less we touch.

Thoughts known without a connection to the sensory.A black rod running through a building, passing floors, going unseen;A fish swimming across a coast, going uncaught;a person chugging whisky, without getting drunk.This is intangible.

Oh,my,good,will,march,why,wha,koo,noh,bleesnzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Wading through a pond of watercrest infused jello,I feel worried.

1,about my skin

1,about my wife

1,about my world,wobbling off it’s axis. Back into the womb from where is wondered, what if…

I drift away from the conscious realm to question;to question where I came from, who am I?why am I here?

Feel free to correct me if there are any grammertical errors.

---ziyuan

A Little Writing Exercise

Not last Thursday but the one before, we all sat down and went "Hmmm. What shall we do today?" I do so love a bit of indecision! For we arrived at the obvious conclusion to get writing!

Following a strict schedule, we decided to put some limits to our writing:
1. Each person decides and writes out their topic, ranging from "Intangible" to "The Sea" to "Office Space".
2. For 2 minutes, everyone writes about the topic in front of them.
3. After 2 minutes, we pass our paper once to the person on our left.
4. Repeat step 2-3 until everyone has written on all the topics.

Thus, the result for "Office Space" is posted below:

[Office Space]

Cara was bored. Bored enough to pretend that she was working diligently, when in fact she was counting the number of pixels it took to make up the word 'dot'.

Funnier than expected. The absolute boon of a square mind. It is a cubist paradise. The most organic of shapes found in this space might be a stapler. A stapler is a point of laughter in the Office Space.

"Hey dear, let's just watch this movie," he said.
"I don't feel like it tonight," she said.
"Common, just get on the couch with me, lean against my arm, I'm sure once it starts, you'll get into it."

10,000 thumbtacks in the wall, nay, cubicle, or particle board, after the economy rupture. Those little pins close in to squish me, inching minute amounts closer as the clock ticks backwards. F*** it, I quit, and I s*** you not I'm stealing the red stapler.

And I stare.
And I stare again.
And I stare again and again, only to discover pixels blurring before my eyes.

It must be for the pins.

If you have one to share, please blog as well!!

Flyer

Hey I found that little piece of paper with the sign-in stuff. I made flyers with submission information, I hope you guys like them. I'm printing them tomorrow, so expect to see them around.

*Jeypeg@yahoo.com

See everybody on thursday, I think. Though actually I have a thing so I might not be able to come, I just remembered. Well I hope you like this.

-Ian

Mark Booth: A Review of a Review

This is a tad late, but better late than never!

On the 6th of October, there was something special going on in room 1307B - Mark Booth's penultimate review. As some of you may know, Mark is one of many awesome faculty members of the Writing department, and deals mostly in writing, sound and painting. As a requirement to qualify for tenure, Mark put a show together as a review of his work.

In general, I was a little surprised that he didn't discuss any of his sound pieces, but I got to see a different side to his work - mainly, his paintings and installations. Many pieces were an interesting fusion of text and abstracted images that evoked more of a feeling than represented anything, but the carefully handwritten text was what interested me most. As a student in the writing department, I've always struggled to know exactly what to put on any text art project, but Mark here seems to pull it off without a sweat: for example, one of his pieces read "One day I went to bed with a witch. The next morning, I could only remember 25 of 26 letters of the alphabet" [exact wording may be slightly different - I'm writing from memory]. There is something personal but distancing about his work, which is not quite ethereal due to the concrete words and language he uses, yet not quite of this world due to the soft colours he uses for painting the background.

Mark also explores the interaction between humans and spaces - an avid fan of George Perec's Of Species and Spaces and Other Pieces, Mark has taken this concept of "What is space?" and made it his own in a gallery installation, cutting out words from museum vinyl and weaving a story on the walls. He also showed us pictures of an installation/performance piece he did in a church, which had him lying on the ground amongst seeds. An environmental streak, perhaps?

In any case, if SAIC doesn't grant him his tenure, I'll...write a letter of complaint! I'll have you know that I can be very persuasive on paper.

Hm. Perhaps this is more of a shoutout than a review. Ah well.

- Nicola

Fall Publication

The theme of this fall's publication will be Cut/Paste. Thanks to everyone who voted- 9 votes, which (realistically) is pretty great act of student involvement... (for an activity that doesn't involve free food)

The deadline to submit work is NOV 8Th, at 11pm! You can submit any form of work, pictures, text, fiction, non fiction, poetry, drawings. Just keep in mind that it'll all be printed in B/W.


Here are some interpretations of Cut/Paste:

• In human-computer interaction, cut and paste and copy and paste offer user-interface paradigms for transferring text, data, files or objects from a source to a destination. Most ubiquitously, users require the ability to cut and paste sections of plain text. ...
  
  
• pieced together from several sources
  
  
• Composing a document by piecing together components of other documents; to delete text or other data in one document and insert it in the same or different one
  
  
• the act of moving blocks of text from one place to another in a document.
  
  
• Unique, engineered restriction enzyme sites in the lacY DNA are used to replace a portion of a mutant with a given cysteine replacement with a homologous segment encoding another single cysteine mutant, to construct a lacY gene encoding a protein with two cysteine residues.
  
  

The next meeting is tomorrow (Thursday) at 4:30 in 1302B, and we'll be making a mini publication, so come draw and write, and cut and paste with us!

And there will be a broadcast of the radio show at 11am tomorrow as well. So if you want to play work on it, send me your mp3's or contact me about playing/reading/sitting in in person @ Jeypeg@yahoo.com

The Sea. THE SEA!

Hello blog world, This is Jeff. Here's my spiel:
After my first Creative Writing Guild meeting, I thought, I could sail around the world with these people. An odd thought for sure, but I justified it with thoughts of the group's utter beguilement. They are charming folk; They should be met by everyone. This I certainly agree to. But as far as the sailing goes, I've decided to scuttle the boat. Perhaps this group writing may give you some idea as to why.

The Sea.
A formless thing given form by borders, by politics; by tyrants guessing where the tyranny ends on the water. Where it ends, that's where the sea begins. the sea is the ultimate dictator. Masters of the formless being are truly servant of the sea. A diplomatic approach is to travel by yacht.

Hey you stupid, get out of the water. Drowning in a sea of blankets night after night, blinking the salty water out of his eyes. Tossing and turning in the waves. Waking up the wife who just wants to sleep, Terry.

A.K.A the ocean. Big, deep, and cold. Do you remember how the salt water smells? Like wet mist and a ship captain's beard. You might not, cause this is Chicago, and the beach here is nowhere close. But if you get up at 6am on a rainy day in the fall when the air is thick, it's close.

Amidst thick air stood a girl who had nowhere to go.

Wait, is that a girl? I rubbed my eyes. My eyesight is damaged a little by the salty breath of wind coming from the sea surface.

Maybe it was a mermaid. I shudder - I never really liked mermaids, having a bad experience at Disneyland. But the sea, the sea, the sea! It's calling me. Telling me to hush and lay down and bury myself under layers and layers of rock and sand. Will I become a fossil, reserved for her only?


Ah yes, it is a group capable of great, imaginative writing, but as you can see, incapable of commanding large bodies of water. Imagine the yacht envy, nightmare plagued, debilitated nostalgic, non-purposeful standing, bad eyesight, self digging grave disaster that would ensue. Oh Terry!

Group Writing 10/14

Here is one of the pieces we wrote together at the last meeting. This one is about Cornish game hens:

You eat em right? They are like those little chickens. At lease, that's what they look like cooked. I have no idea what they look like alive, but I imagine them to be in direct poultry proportion. They must lay tiny eggs.

Unfortunately, they are now extinct. Henry Jones, a CEO of The Unnamed, called for a mass genocide.

The crucial thing about saving them from extinction though, is to secure that they still lay eggs.

They were a breed that were so highly coveted, all because of the legends surrounding them. Legends sprung out from their voices, screaming like a siren: "BUCK! BUCK! BUCK!" Their echoing cries could always cut the thickness of air.

From where I know them, they are very juicy. Appealing yet morbid. A hen ripped apart at the seams, and then spiced to perfection: this is from where I know them. This is how they we.

Grab it by the neck and shake that fucker dead. Ah, grab it by the neck and shake that fucker dead. Well I don't care if you care about it. Don't expect me to be fair about it, grab that hen by the neck and shake it dead.

Minutes from 10/14/10

First radio show aired this morning, and was awesome. The archive is uploaded to the blog under "Radio Show" tab and will soon be in the free radio archives @
http://www.freeradiosaic.org/radio/shows/134/

The deadline for the first publication is Nov. 8th @11pm. The theme is open for vote on the blog, until Tue evening, please VOTE! As soon as Wed you can start submitting work!

The next radio show will be next Thusday @ 11am (the 21st). Send me your mp3’s or e-mail me if you would like to make a live appearance on the show. Jeypeg@yahoo.com

We did some awesome prompt writing- which should be going up on the blog for your reading and giggling pleasures. As always feel free to add to the blog- your work, upcoming readings series you know of, or review, whatever.

And finally if you are interested in organizing a reading please contact me- possible locations include
-Joan Flasch
-13th floor screening room
-Ballroom
-Auditorium
-Off campus

Next week we will be making a mini publication in the group, so you should all come to the meeting and help write/draw it!

Recap

Minutes from the first meeting, on Thu Sep 30th:

This was one of the larger turnouts for CWG, so thanks everyone who came! And if you couldn’t make it, regular meetings will be every Thu, from 4:30-5:30 in 1302 B of the Michigan bld. Or you can just read below, there’s a ton of detail cause I just went over a lot of –importantish info. Skip to the end for summary.

Since it was our first meeting we talked logistics, and goals/needs/desires.

CWG is on the portal under “groups”- “Creative Writing Guild” Supposedly we have an e-mail cwg@saic.edu, but I’m having issues with it, so for now, direct your e-mails to csteph1@saic.edu or Jeypeg@yahoo.com, and I’ll read them. There is a facebook page

http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=5541865678&ref=search and

This blog- if you can't tell has the important information about the meetings, our publication dates and guidelines, archives of our radio show, upcoming readings hosted by us and others, and the coolest thing of all- WRITING! This is a group blog, so please add your own work to it, and give feedback. And if you know of readings happening or cool stuff going on- talk about. Write review, post pictures, whatever, it’s a blog, go nuts. If you would like to participate, e-mail me Jeypeg@yahoo.com for the login info.

We talked about the future of our publication- which looks long and prosperous. We are planning to put out 2 each semester this year, so logistically, the deadline for the first will probably be late Oct, early Nov, and the second one late Nov, early Dec. In the past the collections are writing have all been open calls for submission to the whole school based on a theme (origins, intentions, abridged, implied, passages). And we have published all submissions, we can continue that format, or we can change it if you have ideas.

There is a brand new CWG radio show, this year. We will be “on air” from 11am-12pm, every Thu. Listen live form http://freeradiosaic.org/, or listen to the archives on the blog. The show will be a series of readings, improvisations, noise, music or text performance, radio plays, performed scores, again- your radio show, do whatever you want. You can come perform your stuff live on our show, or pre-record your stuff and send me mp3s to be played. If can pre-record with CWG, we have access to the dj booth or the whisper room. Just send me an e-mail about what you’d like to do, and we’ll make it happen. If you want to attend the technical training session for the DJ booth, it’s THIS THUR, the 7th, @ 11am, meet in the booth on the 13th floor.

That being said, I am hoping to do an open call to the school for this kind of recorded work for a CD compilation towards the end of the year. You can start sending me MP3’s of that now for the radio show, or the CD, or booth, just specify where you want your work to go.

And lastly we talked about readings. It’s really easy and cheap to set up a reading. We just need a space, readers, and a microphone. So if you want to set up a reading and have location ideas, let me know and we can start the planning.

That’s all the biggies. During our regular meetings we are going to start doing some reading of each others work- so if you have stuff to exchange bring a bunch of copies. We’ll also do some writing, we can do some prompts or exquisite corpse stuff. We talked about making some mini publications…,

So think about
1. Writing- what do you want to write about
2. How should we structure our next publication/ a theme?
3. Where you might want to hold a reading
4. Playing on the radio
5. Read/post to the blog

See you next Thu at 4:30. Be there, or be square.