RECAST | Writing Lab: Notebook strategies for working during a pandemic – Wednesdays, 10-11:20 am. Weeks 1-5

From: Towles, Stokley <towless@evergreen.edu>
Date: Sep 8, 2020, 12:15 PM -0700
To: All Staff & Faculty DL <AllStaffFaculty@evergreen.edu>

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish… Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”

– Octavia Butler

Greetings Colleagues,

I want to invite you and your students to participate in Writing Lab. We will gather weekly for five weeks, Wednesdays, 10-11:20 am, weeks 1-5 (or longer if there is interest). Writing Lab is a meeting place for students to share their writing, build a community, and crowd source best practices for working under these unusual circumstances. At the center of Writing Lab, we will open notebooks and dive into a series of free-writing, list making, and drawing exercises. We will share strategies and structures for doing work in the midst of this pandemic. Our goal is to follow Octavia Butler and build habits that will persist. 

Each week, there will be new writing prompts; group writing and sharing exercises with students from other disciplines; and the exploration of different themes such as:

— making a pandemic workspace

— building new routines

— looking closely

— how to organize and mine information in your notebook

Please RSVP if you would like to attend. If you’re bringing students let me know your program name and how many students you have or anticipate and I will save you and your program a spot (and send a zoom link).

The first session will be “Introduction to the Notebook,” a zoom variation of the notebook talk I would normally do in person the first Wednesday of the quarter. If you would like to bring your students to just that one session, that is also an option. 

Looking forward to seeing you on the small screen!

Stokley

Stokley Towles
He/him
Faculty Librarian
The Evergreen State College

PARTICIPANT FEEDBACK from Spring 2020

“Being in a community to write expressively is one of the few joys while in quarantine. I wish I had this as a core experience when I first entered college.” – Gavin

“…inclusive and inspiring, without being overbearing and or stressful.” – Ceugene Bayness

“I love the ritual aspect of this, that every Wednesday at 10 we know we get to come together and tune in and listen to ourselves and each other with curiosity and without judgement. So I value the ritual and the feeling of community.” – Julia Zay

“Thanks for hosting these — they’ve been a great experience for me. Both in terms of my own writing, and in terms of finding new ways to collaborate with a wider community during these isolation times. I took your advice the first week — to start a student writing workshop in my own program — and it has been going great so far!” – Jeff Hall

“I was there partly as a professor and partly as another participant. I think it’s actually a good model for faculty/student contact that Evergreen might want to think about promoting especially during the pandemic.” – Shaw Osha (Flores)

“It grounded the rest of my studies in such a profound way and I don’t know how successful I would have been in my academic work and art otherwise. Thanks for your time and for creating the space.” – Annabelle Morin