East Exit Program

Creative Writing

This course is offered in partnership with the Siena Art Institute's affiliated program, The Siena School for Liberal Arts.
Instructor: Jeff Shapiro

Truth, Lies, and In Between:

Everyone uses, and wastes, words every day. Written words, more lasting and more precious than their spoken sisters, call for especially thoughtful care. Students in this course will experiment with various written forms, then read and discuss one another’s work. Through writing and rewriting their own assignments, commenting on passages by fellow participants, and observing the techniques employed by more established writers, students will explore the individual voices with which they can communicate, inform, provoke, fantasize, convince, seduce, enchant.

Of the two weekly sessions, the first is devoted to group discussion of at least one issue crucial to Creative Writing. Literary passages demonstrating the issues under consideration are read aloud and discussed in class. As homework, students write original pieces pertaining to the weekly issue at hand.

The second session each week is the workshop in which student homework assignments are read, critiqued, and discussed. Although the thought of sharing pieces with a group may initially seem daunting to participants without previous experience in writing workshops, students soon discover the pleasurable luxury of using each other as sounding boards. Writing improves once it is read by intelligent eyes.