PWR 2GMJ: Why Write, Still

"“I only know that learning to believe in the power of my own words has been the most freeing experience of my life. It has brought me the most light. And isn't that what a poem is? A lantern glowing in the dark" Through her writing in Poet X, Elizabeth Acevado invites us to see and experience what it is to come alive. In this class we will study texts that explore how our writing can have this effect—on ourselves and others. In this way we will be seeking out the most transformative, powerful writing practices. This will be the work of the class: to study and then test out rhetorics that keep both writer and audience awake and alive (thinking, dreaming, questioning, implicating…). Not least, this course will help you develop your own voice and style. What makes your writing and speaking unique to you? We will explore this by asking such questions as: How can you show your mind at work in your writing? How do you, in particular, respond to unresolved conflict, difficulty, uncertainty?

Students are encouraged to create dynamic, interactive, multimodal projects that draw on the affordances of technology while surpassing it in cognition, surpassing it in imagination. Students might study a standard rhetorical form that mechanizes our thinking (tests, ballots, driving directions, CV’s, twitter feed, algorithms) and redesign it in a way that remakes that experience as abundantly human; students might research how we communicate now, through dialogue, through music, and draw on our readings to assess them; students might take an entrenched political or ecological problem and rethink it by drawing on any of the arguments we’ve read in class about how to write in new ways and thus see in new ways.

Research Proposal 

(3-5 minute live oral presentation; written proposal of 900-1200 words; reflective memo of 250 words) The goals of this assignment are: (1) to find the initial, key texts you want to wrestle with in your research project and (2) describe them to the class in a way that helps us to see why they are unsettling and urgent and what is at stake in studying them. In other words, this is a chance to not only describe but model the skills we’ve been discussing in class.

Written Research-Based Argument

(10-12 pages or 3000-3600 words of research-based writing) In this paper you will be invited to reimagine the academic essay. As a genre, it appears we can hand it over to ChatGPT. If we are going to write, and thus think, in ways that ChatGPT cannot, then what needs to change and what needs to stay the same? How can we retain the fundamental components of the essay (expository, discursive, researched, logical) while also drawing on the qualities of a more authentic rhetoric that make it powerful, vulnerable, uniquely yours, necessary? What might the academic essay, in its most contemporary, creative form afford? What can your mind do with this genre that a machine cannot? You will be supported in this process with workshops, peer review, much feedback and time for experimentation and revision.

Delivery of Research 

(10 minutes of live oral presentation with multimedia support) As with the essay, you will be asked to draw on course readings/discussions/workshops and reimagine the parameters of the oral presentation. Can we rethink not only its purpose but its form in order to increase its exigence? We will draw on lyric traditions in theater, performance and slam poetry.

NOTE: The course will include attendance at one of the Stegner Fellow poetry readings. Stanford’s 3rd annual spoken word event, “Poetry Live!” will also be happening at the Studio. The event is curated by lecturer in Creative Writing and former Stegner Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen and hosts the award-winning poetry and multi-hyphenate talents of Safia Elhillo and Jamila Woods plus members of Stanford's Spoken Word Collective. Guest speakers.