Scissortail Creative Writing Festival Extra Credit

Starting on Thursday, ECU hosts the Scissortail Creative Writing festival, which features dozens of writers from all around the country who come to Ada to read their works. Each session is about an hour long, and will feature anywhere from 2 to 4 writers, each one reading for about 15-20 minutes. There are also 3 special sessions on Thursday and Friday night, as well as Saturday afternoon: these are our ‘featured’ writers, who get an entire hour to read from some of their latest works. You can find the entire schedule at: ecuscissortail.blogspot.com

If you answer these questions (and do a good, honest job) I will reset your absences to the limit (of 4), and/or give you credit for a few missed responses (in case you've missed too many of them). In other words, this assignment could help fill some deficiencies in the class. But if you don't have either problem, I'll simply give you some extra credit points on your final grade, which could help knock you over if you have a border-line grade. 

PROMPT: I want you to attend AT LEAST ONE session at the festival and write about it following the template below. We won't have class on Friday, so that will hopefully give you a little freedom to attend one of the Friday sessions. Or you can attend more than one and decide which one you want to review--or combine them all into one big session in your questions. 

Answer ALL FOUR QUESTIONS for the session you attend, and give some thought/detail to your answers. You won’t get full credit if you give a one-sentence response or it sounds like you didn’t actually attend the session. Just give your honest response and explain why you felt/answered this way.

Q1: Which of the authors interested you the most and why? Was it a specific poem or story? The way they read and presented their work? Did it remind you of something else?

Q2: Did you feel the writers in this session worked well together? Were they all very similar, or were they all very different? Why do you think they were chosen to read together? How did one reader help you appreciate another one? Did they build up to a climax? Or was the first one the best?

Q3: What makes hearing a writer read their works a different experience than simply reading them yourself? Which writer was particularly effective at doing this? Do you think hearing it helped you appreciate or understand a work that you might not have otherwise? Or would it have been easier simply to read it? What is the biggest advantage (or maybe, the biggest disadvantage) to hearing a work read aloud?

Q4: In general, how did the audience react to these authors/works? Did certain works get more response than others--and if so, why do you think so? Did people laugh? Were they completely silent? Did they applaud? Make appreciative noises? Did people seem to 'get' these writers, or did some leave them scratching their heads? How could you tell? 

The questions are due NEXT MONDAY, April 10th by 5pm.