The Coming Storm

I want to thank everyone for the fascinating and skillful presentations in yesterday's all-too-brief meeting of the Writing Projects and Thesis Prep class. In several cases, talking about your research gave me insights into how it might be made more focused and useful for your studio - I hope it was helpful for you all to cap off the term by talking about the work you'd done and to hear about the impressive variety of work done by your peers.

Plans are afoot for the spring - I will distribute a revised syllabus by e-mail but I wanted to alert you to some significant changes:

Deadlines: It became almost unmanageably confusing for me to have writing coming in from all directions at anytime in the term. In order to budget time to properly respond to your papers, I'm going to set three target dates for you to pass in writing to me. You may continue to explore numerous short pieces (as Keith did) or develop longer works (like Mike or Paul), but I will respond to everything I get in relation to the target dates. It's important that I get writing at each target, because they will be tied to the dates I need to issue deficiency notices or take other administrative actions.

BlogStorm: I'm going to try something this spring. In lieu of writing one major paper, students may participate in a week-long BlogStorm I'm cooking up. I alluded to this in class yesterday and details will be forthcoming, but the gist of the idea is that everyday for a week invited guests will contribute blog postings on ideas that have been found in several students' writing to that point; you must provide three comments (totaling about 750 words) in the week to be excused from one of the papers. I think this will help restore some of the sense of information sharing that is missing from this remote and nomadic course, and hopefully it will put you in touch with a few new resources.

Bibliographies: I'm going to be revisiting the way the bibliography is incorporated into the proposals you submit at the beginning of the semester. I can't unilaterally abolish them, but I want them to be more evolutionary than summary documents (in other words, I want to change the idea that the class is about retrieving information and reporting it in a linear fashion and introduce the idea that this process is more of a loop; information begets expression, which instigates a search for new information that needs to be processed, summarized and expressed, leading to new inquiry). What we're after in the big picture is a more sustainable practice in the studio, and I think we can model that a little hear. I will therefore be asking you to look at the bibliography a little differently.

Again, details on all these will follow, but they are the major modifications I'm suggesting. I look forward to reading the course evals, but it would be more direct to comment on this posting if there's something you'd like to see happen in this class.

best of luck to all and I look forward to hearing about the crits - perhaps we could post comments about crits on the general MFA blog, which is still available but also under-used...