Grades and Final Business

Grades have been updated in Blackboard. Please check these to make sure they are in line with what you think you turned in.

As of this morning, only four students have emailed me a screenshot of their proof that they completed the course eval! (There's a link below to accessing this, and I will reiterate that I will award you an extra credit participation point--which works out to be about 3% of your total participation grade-- if you do this. PLEASE, PLEASE do this, even if you don't need the extra credit. I will love you forever if you just DO THE EVAL.

Portfolios are due WEDNESDAY, DEC 14, by 12:30 P.M. in your student folder of Dropbox. If for some reason you doubt it is uploading to Dropbox properly, email it to me. Better to be safe. The portfolio is worth a whopping 50% of your total grade, and I WILL NOT ACCEPT IT LATE. As in, if you turn the Portfolio in at 12:45, you will fail my class.

I just want to say again what a total pleasure it was to teach this class, and I wish you all the very best, both in your submission (woohoo! first submission!) and in your writing lives. Please keep in touch. The email that will work best for this is writercynthiahand@gmail.com. Let me know the outcome of your submissions! And please, feel free to use me as a reference and approach me if you feel you're ready to start trying to get published.

I'm eager to read your portfolios!

CH

Portfolio Time

It's portfolio time. So here's what I want in your portfolio:

• One of your two revised short stories, formatted exactly to submission standards, ready to go on submission. (Times New Roman, 1 inch margins, page number with your name on the top right--I will put a sample of this in Dropbox.)

• A query letter for said story. (see the post immediately before this one for an example)

• A SASE (stamped), if you are sending out via snail mail.

• A larger manila or priority envelope, if you are sending out via snail mail. (I will pay postage.)

• A letter to ME, about your progress and analysis of the class, which I will keep.



• 2 of your very best workshop responses.

All of these things can be turned in at the ASH lobby between 12:00 and 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday the 13th OR in your specific student folder (the one with your name on it) in the Dropbox. Just make a folder for yourself entitled FINAL PORTFOLIO and clearly label everything that goes in that folder. If you are sending your submission via the internet, please send me a screenshot of your confirmation that you have submitted the story. Visit this website if you need instructions on how to take a screenshot.

Final Letter Guidelines

 The idea behind the final letter is to show a context for the class.  The point of teaching in a portfolio style is that I, the instructor, am able to evaluate you, the student, based on your process as a young writer, not on the final products that you produce.  Here is your chance to explain your process and effort to me, before I grade your work.

            The letter should answer some or all of the following questions:

1)      What was your attitude about writing (and publishing) before you entered this class?   

2)      How were these ideas about writing (and publishing), listed above, challenged or affirmed in this course?  What challenged them?  What was your favorite Conversational Topic?

3)      What was your writing process like during the course?  What did you feel was your biggest achievement?  How did you grow as a writer?

4)      How would you evaluate your “level of engagement” in the course?  How intellectually engaged were you with the readings we read, the workshops, and finally, your own work?   

5)      How did the readings impact your own sense of creative writing?  What were your favorite pieces?  What were the pieces that most affected you, challenged you, made you see another way of thinking?  What pieces did you struggle with the most, and how did you respond to that friction?

6)      (mandatory) How did Jerome Stern affect your ideas about writing?  How did you see his ideas working through the published stories that we read?  Give at least one clear example of something Stern wrote about that you could apply to one of the stories that we read.

7)      What do you want me to know before I read your portfolio?  How do you want me to consider it?  What grade do you believe you deserve in this class?  Why?

The best final analysis letters are the ones that vividly show me your process as a writer, using specific texts, making specific reference to moments in the class or moments in your writing, referring to and even quoting your own work and the work of others.  In other words, specificity is the key.  Don’t write this letter in general terms, saying that “this was good,” or “I didn’t understand this. . .”  Dig deep into your experience.  Ask questions, and try valiantly to answer them.    

Course Evals

Here's the link to the course evals. If you send me a screen shot or something, proving you completed this, I will give you an extra participation point. So yay, extra credit!

https://ir.boisestate.edu/broncocourseevals/student-course-evals/

I will also pick your brain about how you felt the course went next week.

Thanks for being awesome.

Cynthia

Timeliness

So I can feel that some of you are getting a bit cranky because the stories have not been posted in a timely manner. I get that. I do things every week on a very tight schedule, and when things aren't going according to the timeline, I get messed up, myself. So I'm getting cranky, too, because while, yes, there was that one time when I didn't remember to post the stories right away, in this second part of the semester the reason that stories are not being posted promptly is because I am not receiving them on time.

*grouchy teacher voice* This is the part where I would like to remind you of the syllabus, which contains the following passage:

WARNING:  Because I take workshops so seriously, if you don’t upload your story on the day that it is due, you can expect your assignment grade to drop by a full letter.  If you are having trouble writing or finishing your story, please contact me and I will read what you have and help you.

Ahem.
*regular voice* Now all that being said, I like to be pretty easy-going about this kind of thing--if you say you need another few hours, especially for a story that's due on Thursday but we're not going to workshop until the next Tuesday, and you ask me ahead of time, I like to give you that. But I feel like now almost all of the stories are coming in late, which is not fair to me or fair to the students who turned their stories on time.

I am posting today's folder with only one story in it, because I have only received one story. From now on, I will post the workshop folder by 5 pm on the day the stories are due, unless you have spoken with me specifically about posting at another time.

Click the link

There's been some confusion about where to find the workshop stories for this week. *Puts on exasperated teacher voice.* I did say this in class--I have linked the Google Docs folder to the Homework page of this website. So to access the stories, go to the Homework page and click the link for Workshop #1.

See you all later today. Don't forget to bring TWO copies of each letter for workshop. Also, don't forget to do the Jerome Stern reading for today.

Reading Tonight

Tonight there's going to be a reading that I will give you extra credit to attend. It's one of the Campfire series at the Modern Hotel here in Boise. It's also fun. This month it's journalists discussing what stories have resonated in Idaho.

Here's the link to the Facebook event page.

https://www.facebook.com/events/578517255658232/

To get the extra credit, just write a paragraph or two about what the vent was like and what you learned from it. You'll receive an extra participation point.

Get Going!

I read over all of your Five Story projects this morning, and now I'm so excited for the real, full-length stories! So get writing!

To those of you who couldn't see my comments--I think I've figured out why. You have to open the document in your word processor, like Word or Pages or whatever. Don't open it in the Dropbox program. It has its own commenting system, and that was not the one I was using when I commented. I made my comments in Word, and they should be there. Also make sure your document is set to Final Showing Markup in the review pane--otherwise, the comments will be hidden.

One final note: some of you did use bits here that I would consider genre or experimental in some fashion, and that's fine, but I am going to push you to make those stories literary, so if that's not what you want to do, DON'T USE THOSE. It does us little good for me to force you to write a story looking through a completely different lens from what you want the story to me.

Also, like I said in class, I'd like the stories you write for this course to be original to this semester.

See you Tuesday!

Dropbox

Last week I sent invitations to all of you to join the class Dropbox. Please accept the invitation, but just in case it didn't go through and you want to take a look at the exercises for this week, try here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/te5j130tjrkplvj/AABOSqNgWxq3l_8oyf43cl47a?dl=0

I have added our workshop schedule to this website, and edited the Conversational Topics page to account for all the different groups. Please get in contact with your group to discuss how you want to handle your discussion.

Also, please read over the supplemental material about the reading I put up on the last post.

See you tomorrow.

A Few Things

It was such a pleasure to meet you all today! I am excited to hear from the rest of you about your talents, skills, and passions! 

In my rush to give you all the information today, there were a few things I forgot to mention:

ü  Turn off or silence cell phones during class. Because common sense.

ü  No laptops or ipads unless we are specifically using them. You may bring one, but it must be turned off and put away until I have us do in-class writing. Otherwise I get paranoid that you're on Instagram while I'm talking.

ü  Genre v. no genre—I prefer no genre for this class, as a rule, just because of my expertise.  I believe learning to write literary fiction will help you if you want to become a genre writer. I myself am a prime example of that. But I can be reasoned with. If you want to write genre, talk to me about it.

ü  See me before you kill off any characters.