The Experience of Writing is a creative writing class, originally geared to public and private school teachers, grades K-12, but it is and always has been open to any grad student interested in doing some writing. We have sections in fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction.
It is a two-week course. We meet Monday through Friday, July 13-17, and then again Monday through Friday, July 20-24. There is a two hour morning class from 9:30-11:30 a.m., a 90 minute lunch break from 11:30-1:00 p.m., a 1-2 p.m. “visiting writer” session – each of the first nine days of the ten day workshop we will have a published writer read from his or her work and then engage with us all, the fiction writers, poets, and nonfiction writers all together, in an animated Q & A session. Then we end the day with a 90 minute afternoon class from 2-3:30 p.m.
Students choose a genre, choose a section – fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction – and then go to that section twice a day, once at 9:30 in the morning and then again at 2:00 in the afternoon. |
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Each class is basically a writing workshop. The instructors will present readings and in class writing activities that will get us working in the genre of our choice. Then we’ll try our hand at writing our own stories, our own poems, our own creative non-fiction pieces. These will be read to and by one’s fellow students and the instructor with an eye to helping us polish and improve our work. On Friday, July 24, the last day of the class, we will invite all the students from all three sections to read from their work. It is a most wonderful experience, one fraught with excitement and anxiety, one always ending in triumph for all.
Many of the students are public and private school teachers, but just as many are simply adults who love writing – aspiring novelists, poets, short story writers, memoirists or essayists.
We believe teachers are better teachers of writing when they are themselves writing. We also believe that writing is as vital to us as our national defense, as critical to our souls as God and religion, and as nourishing to our overall wellbeing as a good home-cooked meal.
Come on out. Join us. We’d love to have you.
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Instructors:
Jimmy Chesire teaches the fiction section
Herbert Martin teaches the poetry section
Leslie Perry teahes the creative non-fiction section
Sarah Acton
teahes the creative non-fiction section
Book info: If you plan to take the fiction section you should buy the book Writing Alone and With Others by Pat Schneider (with a foreword by Peter Elbow). If you’re planning to take the poetry section, our poet, the remarkable Herbert Woodward Martin, has a textbook for us that he’ll bring to the first day of the workshop. The creative nonfiction people do not need to buy a book as the two wonderful veteran instructors Sarah Acton and Lesley Perry, who taught this section last summer – and had such a tremendous success – will be bringing handouts for all.
Instructors:
- Jimmy Chesire teaches fiction writing and is a lecturer and full-time faculty member in the Department of English Language and Literatures at Wright State University. He is a writer, teacher, counselor, and coach. He teaches first year composition, undergraduate and graduate fiction writing, and a special course on enhancing one's creativity using Julia Cameron’s very popular and widely used text, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Jimmy has also been a home-school teacher and special tutor, teaching reading and writing to kids ages 10-15.
Chesire has published a novel, Home Boy (NAL Books, 1988; Penguin-Plume, 189), a couple of short stories, a memoir piece, and, with the late Yellow Springs photographer Irwin Inman, a second book, A Thousand Strikes: T-Ball Yellow Springs Style (Wild Goose Press, 2004), chronicling the first 19 years of his 25 years as coordinator of the Yellow Springs, Ohio, T-ball program.
- Herbert Woodward Martin served as poet-in-residence and professor of English at the University of Dayton for more than 30 years. An accomplished scholar, teacher, poet and singer, Martin is nationally renowned for his portrayals of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African-American poet to gain widespread artistic acclaim.
Martin's own published works include poetry, drama, opera libretti, a cantata, a Stabat Mater, several song cycles, and literary criticism. His writings have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Images, Poetry, Ploughshares, Oxford Magazine and Late Knocking. His eight collections of poetry include Galileo's Suns, The Forms of Silence, The Log of the Vigilante, a journal of slave captivity, and his most recent volume, Inscribing My Name, published by Kent State University Press. He also co-edited In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a volume of Dunbar's previously unpublished short stories, essays, poems and dramas, which will come out in the Fall of 2009.
Martin's numerous awards and distinctions include the Edwin Mellen Poetry Prize; an honorary doctorate degree of humane letters from the University of Dayton; awards from the Ohio Humanities Council; a Fulbright Scholarship; and the 2002 Governor's Award for the Arts given by the Ohio Arts Council in the "Individual Artist" category.
In 2004, Ronald Primeau, an English professor at Central Michigan University, chronicled Martin's writing and performing career in the book, Herbert Woodward Martin and the African American Tradition in Poetry. In February 2009, a new documentary, "Jump Back, Honey," by independent filmmaker David Schock premiered.
- Leslie Perry
is in her ninth year teaching for the Huber Heights City Schools. She began her teaching career teaching 7th and 8th grade English, coaching The Power of the Pen for two years during which both her teams made it to the state level. She is currently teaching 9th and 10th grade English at Wayne High School where she has served on the discipline and diversity committees and has been the student advisor for Impressions, the high school's literary magazine. Leslie is also a certified Praxis mentor and has been a mentor teacher for the past three years.
Perry earned an M.A. in Education at Wright State University. In 2004 she earned her National Board Certification in Early Adolescence/Young Adult English Language Arts and was given the Who's Who Among America's Teachers award. She's participated in the National Belfer Teacher's Conference in Washington D.C., "Crafting Meaning in the Classroom" at Cedarville University, the Ohio Association for Gifted Children Conference, and multiple OGT and standards-based workshops and conferences.
She is a veteran of Wright State's Institute on Writing and Teaching having attended it as a grad student for three years before being invited in 2008 to join the Institute’s teaching faculty.
- Sarah Acton,
who co-teaches the creative non-fiction with Leslie Perry, is in her tenth year teaching 11th and 12th grade English at Trotwood-Madison High School where she also serves as the English Department Chairperson. She has also served as advisor to the Drama Club, been an Academic Team coach, and been on the Curriculum Review Committee at Trotwood for the past three years.
Sarah is currently working on her master's degree in English, with a concentration in writing, at the University of Dayton. She earned her B.A. in English from Kent State University, graduating Magna Cum Laude, and spent a year studying abroad at Leicester University in England. Sarah also received an Honors Diploma from Kent State and is a graduate from Wittenberg University's two-year Teacher Licensure Program. In addition, Sarah's attended two training workshops for Advanced Placement English, one in literature and onein language, and is authorized to--and does--teach Advanced Placement.
Read what others have said about this course.
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This class is not a series of lectures but a hands-on experience that will involve you in exciting instructional methods through demonstration lessons. Our favorite lessons have been developed over the years from feedback from past participants while other ideas are brand new discoveries from recent research and publications. Routines and organizational tips will help you to integrate reading and writing into your daily plans and keep skills instruction within a meaningful literacy context. 
ory at Wright State University. Nancy is a veteran classroom teacher who has won several teaching awards and has taught in many different contexts: middle school, high school, college, and prison. Nancy is a dynamic speaker and an interactive teacher who has done numerous presentations at state and national conferences. Working in conjunction with PBS stations, Nancy developed teaching materials for the Write Site Journalism, Ohio Reading Road Trip, and Jumpback Historical Fiction programs. Her book, Teaching Grammar with Playful Poems has been published by scholastic, and she has two new articles on multigenre writing. Visit Nancy's website at
