The Craft of Imaginative Writing class went very well despite a few minor glitches that occurred at the beginning of the semester and which we cleared up by the end of the first week. The students enjoyed the class a great deal, and, based on the quality of their in-class questions, written work, and class evaluations, they learned a lot, too. Overall, the course was extremely successful.

I ended up bringing in 19 writers to read, lecture, and talk informally to a class of 15 students, most of whom rarely missed a class and all of whom asked engaged, probing and increasingly insightful questions.

Of the 19 guest lecturers, 14 were paid a $100 honorarium by Learning Innovations. Four writers were MDC employees and thus not paid; and one writer, Jim Daniels, was brought in from out of town by The Florida Center for the Literary Arts.

Prior to each writer’s visit, students read the work of that writer in the anthology I prepared for the class. In some cases the students purchased writers’ books before they came to class, but in most cases, students bought writers’ books after they visited class, according to whether or not the writer piqued their curiosity, and whether they thought they might include an analysis of that writer’s work in any of their papers. Some writers sold their books after their lectures, and some sent signed copies for me to sell. All the writers’ books were available at Books & Books.

Without exception, the writers I invited to class presented engaging, intellectually stimulating information about the craft of writing, and without exception they answered questions in a respectful, meaningful manner and in language appropriate to the academic level of my students. Each writer provided my students with his/her e-mail address, and many students took advantage of this opportunity to follow up on ideas and references made in class as they wrote their short papers as well as the longer term paper.

Many students enrolled in this class attended public lectures given by the participating writers at Books & Books, through The Florida Center for the Literary Arts, and through other venues.

My goals for this class were varied. I wanted primarily to give students a greater sense of the various aspects of training and discipline required to build a “career” in the writing of fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. I wanted students to better understand the “nuts and bolts” of getting the work done in face of other job and family responsibilities (and the meager financial rewards of literary writing). I also wanted the students to understand the discipline that goes into the making of art -- any art--as well as the kinds of freedoms such practice requires and allows. Along with these things, I wanted my students to have a chance to truly interact with writers of all kinds, to ask them any questions they wanted, and to be given the chance to think about aesthetics at a level not often afforded students at the beginning of their undergraduate work. I think this class succeeded on all these levels, in part because I invited the right group of writers, in part because I had a wonderful group of students to work with, and in part (and this was crucial) because I set up the curriculum in such a way that probing and chancy questions were rewarded in terms of grades as well as in terms of the overall dynamics of the class.

The only glitch I experienced had to do with recording the writers’ presentations. Videotaping proved difficult from a technological, logistical and “atmospheric” point of view—that is, it was hard to set up and work in a way that was seamless and not distracting. More importantly, though, I found that the students were far less forthcoming, far less willing to ask probing, revealing questions when the camera (or tape) was on. It made the presenters uncomfortable too. So, although I had hoped to build a video archive of these presentations, I decided to abandon this aspect of the project in favor of creating a stronger, more memorable class.

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