Writing Creatively
As of 2005, this class was taught by Emily and Sumanth (who are dating, much to the delight and mockery of TIP students). The class reads four books during the term: "On Writing" by Stephan King, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" by Salaman Rushdie, "In the Palm of Your Hand" by Steve Kowit, and "Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith" by Anne Lamott. The first week of the course focuses on fiction writing (short Stories), and workshops many times on only one story, which was collectively not finished by the end of the week. The second week focused on poetry and non-fiction writing of all types, including short anecdoteal stories to non-fiction essays. The third week was devoted to finishing a porject of your choice and perfecting it to be shared to the class and staff members alike on the last day. Inside jokes from this class Term II 2005 include (but are not limited to): "I ran from the light blue Gazebo", "Get your butt off my writing", "We hate adverbs", "beep beep beep beep beep boop beep", "Altoids are people too!", "Nooooo! Not the Starbucks!", "Cody's being Italian again", "Rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse...", "Rinse, lather, repeat", "Rinse vs. Trauma-trauma wins!", "Shampoo the Infidels!", "Step right up! Buy a fish, win a frog!", "A curious ant/wanders into no mans land/quite an odd surprise", and of course.... The 2005 Term II class t-shirt read simply, "Steven retuned from the war without lips."
Edit: Emily and Sumanth are now married! Yay!
The class also contained the Bunnies, a group of first and second years, in '05. See the Bunnies.
In 2006 Term Two, the course was taught by Terrie and Alissa. The class read Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man," The Fiction Writer's Workshop, and an anthology of short stories. The whole course focused on fiction writing and short stories, dabbling in poetry but sticking close to the main topic. A few inside jokes are "The boy across the room," in which a mildly amusing misunderstanding regarding breakfast was uncovered during a reading of Ashley's short story, "wood nymph" in which a student was uncerimoniously revealed to have been eavesdropping on a gift stall, "Dude, not cool," and "It's all fun and games until a cat get's thrown against a tree," featured on the front of the t-shirt. (This is drawn from A Good Man is Hard to Find, in which a cat is thrown against a pine tree. The rest of the family is later brutally murdered- including three small childeren- but the chief concern of Writing Creatively, accustomed to such morbidity, was the welfare of the cat.)