Fall 2018

In Crafting Short Fiction from the Sentence Up, I will learn the craft of sentences and scenes. I am very excited about this course because I have been a writer for much of my life and I felt that I did not get adequate instruction in creative writing. By breaking the process down to its smallest component, the sentence, I hope to improve my writing skills and use them to continue working on a story idea I started over the summer. In the end, a story is just many sentences and scenes strung together with a plot, so if I begin with strong sentences I hope I can write a good novel. This project will likely stretch far beyond this semester and this course, but I hope that the skills I’ll learn will prove invaluable for years to come. 

In printmaking 1 I am excited to explore a new artistic medium. I am especially interested in printing on textiles, which is a focus of this course. Using the printmaking studio materials, I hope to tell stories that are important to me presently and learn new skills that I can continue to use in my artistic practice even after the conclusion of the course. I am already in the process of planning my first project, with the theme “water is life.” The first project utilizes hand-carved linoleum blocks pressed to the substrate by hand. I am very excited to select a textile to print on as well as another material. The challenge of the first project is to come up with a way to combine the textile with paper. I am not sure how I will execute this yet, but I hope that once I familiarize myself with my substrates I will see a way to combine them. I am very excited to work with textile, at various points in my youth I aspired to become a clothing designer and I have been feeling the itch to create clothing again recently. This semester I hope I can combine printmaking with clothing design, as well as with other artistic methods I use such as painting and drawing.