Monday, July 4, 2011

Wordplaygrounds: Week Two, Day One!

The power was back at the Glencoe Public Library, so we held our third session back in familiar territory. On day three we were focusing on describing things in unpredictable or unexpected ways, so our first exercise was an activity called "Exquisite Corpse". Each member of the workshop wrote a single sentence or line on a piece of paper, then folded their paper over so no one could see what they had written. Next, everyone passed their paper to the right, where the next person would write another line on the paper without knowing what the first line had said. Once the papers had made it all the way around the group, we all read our compositions aloud. While they didn't all make sense, we came out with a few strange masterpieces that fit together in an entirely bizarre and enticing way! Next we all took part in an activity dubbed "Superstitious Definitious" by Mr. O'Connor, which one member of a pair would write three questions: (For example, "What is hunger?", "What is war?", or "What is a watermelon?") while the other member would write three answers without knowing what the questions were. The results were at some times hilarious, at others incomprehensible, and occasionally brilliant, answering the question in a way that might never have occurred to us otherwise. For the last activity of the day, the class was introduced to Ode Poems-- though traditionally written to extravagent or beautiful things such as the sun or Helen of Troy, we were asked to write to something much more mundane and common to our daily lives.

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