Applied Writing: English 1000 Introduction to Creative Writing
In this course we encountered and composed a variety of poetic and hybrid texts that merged the personal with the social, with a special emphasis on autoethnographic and ekphrastic writing. Considering the positioning of a narrator to their subject, students explored what it meant to
write from, write towards, write about, and write with. Each student submitted texts to workshop a longer piece of creative writing.
In completion of this course I submitted a portfolio with a workshopped creative writing piece titled “Out of Sight,” a murder mystery from two third-person perspectives as well as multiple free-write exercises of poetry, image-free association pieces, and somatic exercises.
Applied Writing: English 2010 Creative Writing-Fiction
A story cycle is a work of literature that is not quite a short story collection, nor is it exactly a novel. We might refer to these works as composite novels, in which it is possible to read and understand the stories as standalone pieces, but when read together these pieces create, if not quite an arc, then a larger narrative whole. In other words, the pieces in a story cycle can be read both independently and interdependently.
Story cycles tend to concern groups of people or communities rather than the fate of one or two characters. The connections between stories are sometimes explicit, sometimes more thematic or atmospheric. When we construct a story cycle, we construct a world, but the aspects of this world may or may not cohere in a sense of completion or resolution.
In this course, students built a cycle of their own stories. My text was entitled “Waking Nightmares” which took inspiration from my own dreams to create an immersive experience of a character gaining consciousness within the metaphysical realm of dreaming.
Writing 3500 Capstone: Writing Design and Circulation
The primary goal of this capstone course for the Minor in Writing Practices was to create and present a professional electronic/web-based portfolio synthesizing university writing experiences. This portfolio showcases and offers reflective insight into a student's writings, demonstrating the writer's ability to navigate diverse rhetorical situations. Students learned theories and practices for selecting, arranging, and circulating/publishing written work, culminating in a required portfolio that synthesized their university writing experiences. In addition to practicing principles of editing and design, students produced a substantive revision of a previous piece of their own writing and compost a theory of writing that synthesized analyses of their practices with published scholarship and research. The course covered design considerations and strategies and offered studio time for peer and instructor feedback. It culminated with a public showcase.
Writing 2000: Theories of Writing
This course introduced a number of theories of writing, providing an overview of complex issues and research into the state and status of writing and writers. It took up such questions as these: What is writing? Where did it come from? How did it develop--and did it do so the same or differently in other cultures? How do writers develop--and what accounts for differences? What are different types of writing, different situations for writing, different tools and practices--and how do these interconnect? What does it mean to study writing? How have major figures theorized writing, and what tensions emerge among their theories? What are relationships among thought, speech, and writing--and among image, film/video, and sound? How do such theories change our notions of what texts are and what texts do? Students learned various theorists, historians, and researchers answered these questions, and applied that knowledge to their own projects.
I answered and explored the aforementioned questions through three main projects: An Audiocast on the word "Acatalepsy" to understand the meaning and historical applications of the term, a Creative Non-Fiction exploration of an artifact on the University of Denver campus, in my case the art installation “Whispers” a series of lip statues/benches, and a Research Exploration on “The rhetoric of commonly suggested writing advice generated by a simple internet search.”
Theory, History, Research in Writing: Writing 2555 Diverse Rhetorics
Rhetoric’s origins in classical texts, in the western canon, developed to serve early forms of democracy and civic participation. Despite classical rhetoric’s formative impact, plenty of languages and cultures have their own means of persuasion and civic participation. This course introduced ways that rhetoric is practiced in diverse contexts, not as a stable idea, but as an adaptive practice situated in cultures, identities, and languages, bridging writer, audience and purpose. This course started with classical Western rhetoric, but then explored the varied practices and theories of, for example, African American, Asian, Latinx, Indigenous, and queer rhetorics, to name a few.
In this course I explored the “How To Bridge Communities: An examination of Jell-O and Funeral Potatoes” in a rhetorical analysis of artifacts I associate with Utah culture and a seminar paper titled “The Power in Naming: the Bear Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition Against the United States” which analyzed the rhetoric of omitting Indigenous titles from government articles and declarations.
