Literary Education

2010

Screenwriting Workshop--Friday, Nov. 5th, 2010

This workshop will look at effective ways to write for the screen.   We'll watch film clips, study scenes from celebrated screenplays and complete exercises to help us get at how best to make our stories and characters believable, enjoyable and compelling.   For all levels of writers.

Bio
Jeff Bens directs the creative writing program at Manhattanville College.   He is author of the novel Albert, Himself and director of the documentary film, Fatman's.  His short fiction and essays are published widely.  Jeff has served on film festival juries around the world and will serve on the 2011 Slamdance feature film jury.   He was a founding faculty of the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. 

Writers in Schools

The Florida Literary Arts Coalition "Other Words" Conference, in association with Flagler College and the Cyprian Center for Expressive Arts, will conduct a one-day Poetry Tour (including workshops and readings) through St. Augustine and Hastings, Florida. Poets Lisa Zimmerman and Tonia Rochelle will lead the workshops and readings.

 

The Other Words Poetry Tour will be conducted in conjunction with the Coalition's annual Other Words Conference on November 4-6, 2010 in St. Augustine. The tour will host Lisa Zimmerman, a Colorado poet, Tanya Rochelle, from Atlanta, to present creative writing programs at three locations in the St. Augustine region.

 

Through engaging "word play," the Other Words Poetry Tour will provide opportunities for elementary and middle-school students to write, share and learn more about the impact of creative writing and its relevance in their lives. Although Florida has mandated state requirements for arts education among the areas of dance, theater, art and music, there is no corresponding state or county mandate for education in creative writing, an often-overlooked discipline in the creative arts. The tour will help fill that void.

 

O.U.R. 21st Century Community Learning Center, Hastings, Florida: Located in rural town of Hastings, near St. Augustine, the youth-focused O.U.R. Center hosts arts classes in its after-school enrichment program. Flagler College, Other Words' host institution, has a long history of involvement at the O.U.R. Center through a program of after-school poetry outreach, conducted by Flagler College Professor Kim Bradley.

2009

During the 2009 "Other Words" Conference Recreational Center (6150 South Main Street, Hastings) after school teen-age students worked with writers Shobha Sharma and Chad Sweeney.


Sharma talked about haikus and their history and asked students to write some haikus. She brought some picture postcards to give them ideas. Sharma teaches at Northeastern Illinois University, where she taught English as a second language (ESL) to recent immigrants for almost ten years. Her writing has appeared in anthologies from Tall Grass Press, Jane's Stories Press Foundation, and in the collection My Little Red Book.


Poet Chad Sweeney to Hastings to work with students from the second to fifth grade. Sweeney read "Karawane," Hugo Ball's sound poem of nonsensical German words. The kids wrote their own versions and performed them. Some of their poems are posted here: http://juiceupthetruesay.blogspot.com/2009/11/chad-sweeney-visits.html. Sweeney is the author of Arranging the Blaze, An Architecture, and A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer. He is co-editor of Parthenon West Review and editor of Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds. He earned an MFA from San Francisco State University and is a Ph.D. candidate in literature/poetry at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.