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Middle School Literary Arts
Students engage with the building blocks of writing: words, sensory details, metaphors, and voice while filling their Writer’s Toolbox with a variety of aids and devices to get even the best writer out of a mental block, and onto crafting the next Great American Novel—or slam poem. In addition, students will learn the basics of interviewing and creating story ledes, dive into the world of poetry and get hands on experience with online publishing.
High School Mythology and Contemporary Imagination
Students will be reading and discussing myths from a variety of origins and cultures, examining their roots and overlap, and retelling them in a variety of forms: poetry, personal essay, fiction, and oral story telling.
High School Journalism
Students will be exposed to basic journalistic concepts, and will become familiar with online publishing methods and tools. Along from the publication of The Telegraph, students will learn the tenets of a variety of journalistic forms—from traditional AP Style news reporting, to opinion, advice, and review writing; to feature writing and everything in between—through the reading of contemporary texts and examples.
High School Poetry Workshop
This class is intended to prepare you to confidently read, write, and discuss poetry. The semester will include two rounds of workshops, and conclude with students compiling the best of their work into a chapbook, as well as a presentation of a poet of interest at some point during the semester.
Fiction Workshop
Writers are always telling each other to show, don’t tell. More than show in our writing, the aim of this class is to do with our writing. We’ll learn to do unto readers what happens in the hearts and minds of our characters. We will study techniques that authors like Jane Austen, James Joyce, Jhumpa Lahiri, Toni Morrison, and Alice Munro have used to make readers feel surprise/suddeness, confusion, and recognition that mirrors that of their protagonists. Students will generate their own techniques to enact sensations and meanings and will write a fully-developed story that receives a full class period of workshop time.
Senior Books
Senior Books is a yearlong course for Literary Arts Seniors that is the culminating experience of their time in Lit Arts. Each student will create and publish a book and will work independently (with faculty support) to make this happen. Students choose their project (full-length novel, novella, poetry chapbook, essay collection, screenplay, mixed genre collection, etc.) as well as the design, front and back cover, book size, etc.
Transformation Strategies
Students in this course will make—literally make—the connections between your writing and other art forms. This class transforms far-flung aspects of the world into literary art, be it ancient philosophic traditions, viral Internet sensations of the moment, or the Hubble Space Telescope.