On Shaking Things Up: Art and the Role of Surprise

“Imagination, more than any other capacity, breaks through ‘the inertia of habit.’” (Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination, p.2 quoting John Dewey) “The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.” Pablo Picasso “I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.” Flannery O’Connor A few years after college–after [...]

Free flow: watching & learning from my students

While I’m sorting out my problems with archived posts’ broken links (argh), wrestling with upcoming talks, and complaining about Vermont’s never-ending winter, I thought it would do me and you good to move to a more positive outlook and point to some extraordinary work my students are doing with Web-based practices. (This is what I [...]

(the new) bgblogging

Although I’ve been blogging with my students on WP for a couple of courses and have bgexperiments for my creative-writing exercises, bgblogging has heretofore lived, and quite happily so, on Movable Type. But in six weeks’ time I will be leaving the faculty of Middlebury College and thus must start now to pack my bags [...]

Grading Partnerships in the Classroom, Conversation #3

I know that I have been hammering away about grading in the new classroom, student responsibility, and faculty resisting substantive change to the way they teach and therefore use grades, but I’m doing it again here, because of an amazing class yesterday during which I watched my students connect with one another in authentic, deep-learning [...]

Building a Course, Weaving a Story: Writing the Experience

The first thing our architect did when designing our house was ask each of us to write a narrative about our relationship to space–what kinds of spaces we felt drawn to, how we felt in various spaces, how we felt about colors and textures and memories of spaces and places we loved. He didn’t want [...]

Some Irish Writers You Really Ought to Read…or… How I Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day

March 14 2008: The Day My Father Would Have Turned 90

The Ides of March Approach

Voting Today in A Vermont Village After Teaching

Why Open A Creative Writing Course with Multimedia Experiments

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