Writing Workshop Research Articles

Writing Is a Foreign Language, And a Senior Writing Workshop Is a Tower of Babel Whose Many Languages Need To Be Translated

This paper, presented at the CCCC 2008 Senior Citizens Writing session, draws upon my experiences as a senior workshop member and past teacher. Addressing workshop leaders, it emphasizes the need for the many-faceted seniors’ voices to be “translated” and tested within a workshop’s microcosm before entering the outside world’s macrocosm.

Writing and the Problem of Will: The Creative Writing Workshop and the Stanley Milgram Paradigm

The classroom exchange of student feedback, along with the writing exercise and close reading, remains a common staple of Creative Writing teaching. Nevertheless, its acceptance by students rests on a willingness to learn through trial and error, and openness to being guided by their peers and by their tutors along this path. Where these break down, the freedom and informality of the workshop can become the conditions that strengthen hostility and mistrust. At such moments this tutor uses research by Latané and Darley (1970) and Milgram (1974) as material for debate about responsibility, authority and individuality. Their experiments demonstrate that an instinct to conform with their peers, and an instinct to rely on authority figures, interferes with normal people's ability to act as individuals for the common good. In the shorter term, a study of these experiments can help students understand the need to work together under tutorial guidance. In the longer term, they can spur thought and debate on the nature of authority in the artistic calling.

Afterword

Afterword Percival Everett (bio) A true thing, if not a good thing, about afterwords is that no one really ever reads them. The remarkable work that precedes this effort dwarfs significantly anything that I might or certainly will say. This is an important and timely mission taken on by my friend Salar Abdoh. And I cannot emphasize enough how undeserving I am of the designation co-editor. Still, I will wear it proudly, if with a bit of embarrassment. We Americans are a privileged lot, lucky to live at least with the perception that we are free to write what we wish. To a large and important degree this is quite true; we can write whatever we like. Whether it will find publication or be received in a way as to have impact on the culture, well that is the problem of any culture in any time. What is true is that we can write whatever we like, whether true or not, whether factual or not, whether well-intentioned or not, without fear of incarceration, exile, or worse. The writers presented here have often put their words on paper knowing what ills might await them. We readers are privileged to find these works and so be given a view of the world, of human experience and interaction, outside our relatively safe bubble. It is simply true, that unlike many European nations, the United States does not have an active industry or culture of translation. One hopes, I hope, that this large effort of Professor Abdoh and the writers represented here will facilitate and generate more interest in not only the literature of the Middle East and North Africa, but literatures of all cultures and languages. [End Page 1246] Percival Everett Percival Everett, who lives in Los Angeles, is Distinguished Professor of English and former Chair of the Department of English at the University of Southern California, where he teaches fiction writing and theory. He also teaches fiction writing at Breadloaf and at the annual CALLALOO Creative Writing Workshops. He is author of more than twenty books of fiction, including Walk Me to the Distance, Big Picture, Frenzy, Erasure, Wounded, The Water Cure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Everett is featured in Callaloo 28.2 (2005). Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Scholarship Opportunities for Trainees and Clinician Educators: Learning Outcomes from a Case Report Writing Workshop

Publishing a case report demonstrates scholarly productivity for trainees and clinician-educators. To assess the learning outcomes from a case report writing workshop. Medical students, residents, fellows and clinician-educators attending a workshop. Case report writing workshop conducted nine times at different venues. Before and after each workshop, participants self-rated their perceived competence to write a case report, likelihood of submitting a case report to a meeting or for publication in the next 6-12 months, and perceived career benefit of writing a case report (on a five-point Likert scale). The 214 participants were from 3 countries and 27 states or provinces; most participants were trainees (64.5 %). Self-rated competence for writing a case report improved from a mean of 2.5 to 3.5 (a 0.99 increase; 95% CI, 0.88-1.12, p < 0.001). The perceived likelihood of submitting a case report, and the perceived career benefit of writing one, also showed statistically significant improvements (p = 0.002, p = 0.001; respectively). Nine of 98 participants published a case report 16-41 months after workshop completion. The workshop increased participants' perception that they could present or publish a case report.

The Effects of Transformational Literature on Children's Topical Choices for Writer's Workshop in an Urban Kindergarten.

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to document the writing choices of kindergarten children in an urban setting after planned experiences with transformational literature. This research involved nineteen kindergarten students who were participants through the naturalistic setting of routine classroom instruction. Four social issues texts were read aloud and discussed with the children. Their choices of writing topics for writer’s workshop were recorded before and after the use of these critical literacy sources. Results indicated a trend in children’s topical choices for writer’s workshop moved from an egocentric perspective to more prosocial and altruistic stances. Key word: Early childhood transformative teaching.

Professional Grant Proposal Writing Workshop

Professional Grant Proposal Writing Workshop

Rewriting Writers Workshop: Creating Safe Spaces for Disruptive Stories

This article explores a third-grade teacher’s use of critical writing pedagogy to encourage students’ exploration of issues that were important in their lives from personal as well as social perspectives.

Écriture du traumatisme ou traumatisme de l’écriture ? (deux femmes, deux histoires, deux écritures)

Writing workshops for adult out-patients are held once a week at the Centre d’Étude de l’Expression in the Clinique des Maladies Mentales de l’Encéphale. The author, a specialist in trauma for ten years, has been leading the workshop since 1997. A theoretical reflexion centred on psychological trauma and writing was elaborated through two clinical studies.

Writing Watts

The Watts Writers Workshop was among the most visible community arts projects to develop in Southern California after the 1965 Watts riot. The brainchild of author, screenwriter, and Hollywood personality Budd Schulberg, the workshop sought to develop creative writing talent as an antidote for black social alienation. As an effort in interracial urban reform through artistic expression, the workshop found strong initial support among liberal celebrities, government officials, and private foundations. The increasing salience of the black power movement, however, raised serious internal questions regarding the workshop's avowedly integrationist mission. The Watts Writers Workshop thus offers an important window into the 1960s-era conflict between liberal and radical forces.

Ayurveda and eCAM: A Closer Connection

Ayurveda and <i>eCAM</i>: A Closer Connection

The Mildred Wirt Benson Digital Collection: Digitizing the Mysterious Nancy Drew Author

The University of Iowa, first in the nation to offer advanced degrees for creative writing and home of the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop, has a long history of turning out many of America's best-known authors. However, one of the most popular and enduring novelists ever to have graduated from the UI is hardly a household name. Mildred Wirt Benson, under the much more familiar pseudonym Carolyn Keene, wrote the first 23 Nancy Drew mystery novels. The longest-running juvenile fiction series ever, the series has sold over 200 million books, received translation into 25 languages, and inspired adaptation for numerous film and television versions. In 2007, staff of the UI's Digital Library Services department embarked on a digitization project (

Changing the Culture of "Test Prep": Reclaiming Writing Workshop

Changing the Culture of "Test Prep": Reclaiming Writing Workshop

Svidrigailov's Dream

Svidrigailov's Dream* Sarah Valentine (bio) Her limbs too soft, almost, to feel the bone,she came at me from a dark corner. Drippingwith moss. All five years of her.She wanted it. Somehow horses brayed beyondthe wall and lightning crackled, though it never rainsin Petersburg this time of year. Heat sticksto yellow brick and night or day you inhale fog. Suddenly I'm in a tilting room—the slantsand slats breathe one word at me: criminal. But it's not methey want—it's that pussy Raskolnikov. So softthat even as he brought the ax down on her greasy skull,even as her small evil buckled to the floor and hidden trinketsrattled from her dress he wept confession. I feel the wet snoutnudge my neck. I turn but there is only a cracked teapot onlya crumpled letter and these reeking walls. The horseis in here somewhere. My father taught me how to hustle. Marfa, rich slut,way too easy. After so many years of her powderedstink, even with my lovers, designer suits, myallowance, I bored. So what? I am in that barn now,rigged with candles. Vodka, sausage, Georgian wineand whores—my serfs, my wife: all the same.Funk of bare feet and manure, their sychophantic wails.The gypsy band's accordion, the rasps of their women.I swell with pleasure. But there's the horse again, this time in the square,buckling beneath the peasant's blows and all I want [End Page 381] is to get to the part where through a drunken hazeI pick a servant, any servant, and take him out backinto my tongue-tied versts.But the peasant won't stop and I am turningblue. I grab his stick, push him aside and pushthe horse's tail out of the way. Its head and front legsscrape the cobblestones. [End Page 382] Sarah Valentine Sarah Valentine, a member of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops, recently received her Ph. D. degree in Slavic languages and literatures from Princeton University. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Slavic Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Footnotes * Svidrigailov is the villain in Dostoevsky's 1866 novel Crime and Punishment. Although Raskolnikov, the main character, commits a murder, he repents, whereas Svidrigailov commits multiple crimes without remorse. These include the rape of a five-year-old, the murder of his wife Marfa and one of his servants, possibly male prostitution and the attempted rape of Raskolnikov's sister. Copyright © 2008 Charles H. Rowell

Share a Table, Make a Friend

FEATURED AUTHOR—DARNELL ARNOULT Share a Table, Make a Friend Tom Rankin Darnell and I met twenty-six years ago in a dining hall on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We met for coffee early one morning, either before or after Daniel Patterson's "British and American Folksong" class, which we both were taking in 1980. 1 had just moved to Chapel Hill to pursue a graduate degree. Darnell had been there for several years as an undergraduate student, after moving from Camp Lejuene. That morning in the Pine Room she walked up to me and pointed to a little triangular sign that was visible on all the dining hall tables. The sign read, "Share A Table, Make A Friend." "Want to share a table?" she asked, making sure I saw the sign. I carried my coffee to the table nearest her and we sat down. I mostly remember her talking, telling about how she'd come to Chapel Hill from the marine base, about her former marine husband, about her two young children, Chad and Beth. And she continued talking. My recollection is that all there was to do was listen while she talked, drinking my coffee slowly. And I'm still listening. At the time we met, Darnell was a single parent in UNC-Chapel Hill family housing, attending school while raising her two young children, balancing her role as a mother and student. In addition, she was primary guardian and caretaker for her mother, Juanita. Many of her college friends, me included, had little else to worry about other than our course work or next paper or small commitments that accompany such things as graduate assistantships. Darnell talked about her desire and commitment to write long ago, certainly as long as I've known her. I well remember her telling me, maybe even during our very first visit, that she planned to write fiction and poetry. And what has always impressed me is that she has written regardless of what else has gone on, regardless of the other impediments to having time and quiet moments, regardless ofwhether anybody seemed to really care if she wrote or not. She wrote because she wanted to, and as if there was never any choice. My friend Larry Brown used to talk about learning to write as an apprenticeship much like learning to be a carpenter or a bricklayer. That's the good news, he 22 would say. The bad news is that no one really knows how long their apprenticeship will be when they start out. He would tell students it may be five years, could be ten, could be more. Darnell seems to have known this as well, and has never really worried about the length of her apprenticeship or expected anything to come easy. She's just continued to write. I've always been impressed by Darnell's modest tenacity, her persistence without complaint or ostentation. She's just kept at it, between raising two wonderful children, becoming a grandmother, and looking after her mother's care since she turned eighteen years old. She's worked all kinds ofjobs, including in a furniture factory, as a house cleaner with her own business under the 'corporate' logo of "Jill ofAll Trades," and, blessedly, as one of the first people hired to work at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She's taught writing through the Duke Writer's Workshop and through Continuing Studies at Duke, among many other places. Since my first morning of sharing that table with Darnell, I've been enthralled with how she extracts laughter from solid darkness and compelling poetry from the hard toil of the day to day. Darnell can walk across the street to buy a stick of candy and return with a fully developed story from the most ordinary of interactions. Last year on one of her visits to North Carolina, Darnell stopped in to see her mother who lives in a small assisted-care home in Hillsborough. Always the dutiful daughter, she picked her mom up and drove her to Durham to get Juanita a favorite treat, a Wimpy's hotdog. Since they...

The Effects of Writing Workshop on Abilities of First Grade Students to Become Confident and Independent Writers

Writing Workshop is an interactive approach to teaching writing as students learn and practice the importance of rehearsal, drafting/revising, and editing their pieces of writing (Calkins, 1986; Graves, 1983). This study implemented a mixed methodology design incorporating qualitative and quantitative analysis (Mills, 2007) by administering a pre survey to each child before he/she began the Writing Workshop and a post survey after the intervention; systematic observational research as a checklist (Glanz, 2003) to record observed practices of students during peer revising conferences; portfolios to assess student writing and graded via a rubric; and lastly interview of students regarding confidence and ability in writing. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the writing processes of drafting/revising and editing to support first grade students to become independent writers.

Remembering Kurt Vonnegut

Remembering Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007 "All this happened, more or less," writes Vonnegut in the opening line of his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Vonnegut taught—more or less—a generation how to rewrite and reread American culture. How to get outside of it and laugh and cry and scream about it. He delivered biting satire through unpretentious, innovative narrative with irreverence, brilliance, and humor. To simutaneously bellylaugh and think deeply about American society, culture, and history was his particular form of genius. I met him for the first time in the mid-eighties. He was a literary rock star at the time. He and I sat down for a beer at the college pub. I wanted to ask him so many things, but wound up compressing them into one question: "Where's it all headed, Mr. Vonnegut?" He replied, "The world's on the brink of a nuclear war and the only thing preventing it from happening is an alcoholic president staring down his last beer in an otherwise empty refrigerator." Wittgenstein couldn't have answered my question more deeply, but I also lost some of my beer from laughing so hard. I raise a last glass to Mr. Vonnegut. —Jeffrey R. Di Leo Tralfamadorians, who understand time, know that people only appear to die, because they're still very much alive in all the other moments oftheir life. On April 11 , 2007, Kurt Vonnegut will always have died. But that signature sardonic humor, that compassionate pessimism, all those foma, wampeters, and granfaloons, remain alive in the pages ofhis books. In those books, Vonnegut's great heart will continue to beat, forever unstuck in time. —Charles B. Harris VONNEGUTS-A MEMOIRRHOID It was a bright spring afternoon in Manhattan, and I was headed uptown. George Plimpton had arranged a gathering at Elaine's that he gave some kind of sappy name like Convergence ofGenius, or the Genius Club. It was meant to create an artistic, literary think tank. Many eminences like Joseph Heller, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe, and etc. were among the geniuses. I had just published The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968) and doors were opening for me, though I understood little about how to use this advantage. I was invited to this gathering but was too shy and insecure to know how to maintain myself among the literary/artistic glitterati. My seat was at a table with only Kurt Vonnegut and his friend, the photographer, Jill Krementz, whom he later married. I had almost crossed paths with Vonnegut before. Hejust left his teaching gig at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, when I started mine. I did meet Edie, his daughter, whom I liked a lot. She was finishing school there, an art major. Edie visited me at my apartment on Morton Street once, with her boyfriend, little Geraldo Rivera. He hadn't yet started on his way to being the media brute he is today. I could see he had little interest in what I was doing. Edie told me she'd shown my novel to her father, and he didn't know what to make of it. 1 wasn't attracted much to the writing in Cat's Cradle (1963), the only Vonnegut I'd read. My general social ineptitude and discomfort among geniuses conspired with those hovering opinions to make a nearly silent table. Mr. Vonnegut tried very hard to tell jokes and be jovial. Some of them must have been about the silly situation with geniuses. I might have enjoyed this under different circumstances. Jill Krementz enjoyed him immensely. I couldn't listen. I couldn't laugh. I could only think foolishly that we worked on different writing planets, his obviously more popular and lucrative. I didn't have the grace to break through socially to a more congenial posture. When I visited Dresden, I thought frequently ofVonnegut, ofhis distress after writing Slaughterhouse Five (1969). I was on a research trip to see all the paintings ofAntonello da Messina for my novel, Antonello's Lion (2004). Five months earlier I had emerged from a quad bypass extravaganza, and didn't know what my life would...

Mentoring Disadvantaged Nursing Students Through Technical Writing Workshops

Recent studies have identified a problematic gap for nursing students between terse clinical writing and formal academic writing. This gap can create a potential barrier to academic and workplace success, especially for disadvantaged nursing students who have not acquired the disciplinary conventions and sophisticated writing required in upper-level nursing courses. The authors demonstrate the need for writing-in-the-discipline activities to enhance the writing skills of nursing students, describe the technical writing workshops they developed to mentor minority and disadvantaged nursing students, and provide recommendations to stimulate educator dialogue across disciplines and institutions.

Helping Struggling Writers Succeed: A Self‐Regulated Strategy Instruction Program

While writer's workshop provides a nurturing environment for many students, others struggle with the independence it gives. This may be due to the difficulty of coordinating the cognitive and self‐regulatory demands of the writing process. Self‐regulation refers to thoughts, feelings, and actions that individuals use to attain personal goals. Because of the independent nature of writing, an adequate level of self‐regulation is required to move through the process.Teaching self‐regulatory strategies within the context of writing may enable students to develop and execute a plan of action independently, resulting in more independent writing. The Self‐Regulated Strategy Development model of instruction is one such strategy. In order to examine its impact, the model was used to teach a summary writing strategy to a struggling sixth grader. Following instruction, the student exhibited more confidence in her writing abilities, a greater belief in the benefits of strategy use, and the ability to tackle the writing task more independently.

Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza

Why New Orleans Matters Tom Piazza. New York: ReganBooks, 2005. Do you hear that sound, that low moan, distinct from the din of mourning for Katrina's dead and the utter physical destruction of vast expanses of property and land in Louisiana and Mississippi? More than a year after the devastation brought by the tropical demon, that sad, synchronized song is growing distant. But it's still being heard and felt: Those who treasure the unique music, cuisine, architecture, and dialect of New Orleans continue to mourn the potential loss of one of American culture's great natural resources. The tour books typically, and correctly, point to the depth of American musical roots, the multiple variants of rock and roll, RB people had no sanitary facilities, no medical care, and the weakest were easy pickings for the predators among them, he writes of the goings-on at the Convention Center. Thousands lived through scenes out of Goya or Hieronymus Bosch. Nobody came through ... to give them some hope (xi-xii). The author, a New Yorker enamored of the exotic sound of New Orleans music-from Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong to Fats Domino, Professor Longhair and Dr. Johnmoved to the Crescent City in 1994, after graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop. But he fell in love with New Orleans in 1987, when visiting for the Jazz and Heritage Festival, known as Jazz Fest to locals and devotees. …

ECAM: Moving Forward

<i>eCAM</i>: Moving Forward