Week 1 Morning Pages

Here's where the summary of your week's engagement with daily writing practice goes. Don't post your daily writing but a single paragraph about your Process - what you did, how it worked, challenges and triumphs. Then comment on two classmates' posts about their process. Be encouraged and encouraging.

Introductions

Please introduce yourself with the following information by adding a comment below: A few words about who you are and how you chose African American Literature; Your Is eLearning Right for Me survey score Your selection of three Themes of Literature that you will focus on this summer; Be sure to include details that we would not find out looking at you or by reading your resumé. Be sure to respond substantively to at least two classmates posts with a favorite quote or a little something extra, checking to ensure that everyone gets a reply - not just the first five to post. If you build it (community) we will thrive. Welcome aboard! CAUTION: Spell & grammar check everything BEFORE posting. Unedited, unsupported posts will not receive credit. As will be the custom throughout our time together, for full credit, two (2) paragraph-length, four-sentence PREPed responses to two (2) classmates are required each time you post.

Week 1 Assignments

Someone wrote to ask for further information about this week's assignments so I thought posting it here couldn't hurt. [R]est assured that this class will prepare you not only for future classes but for life by polishing your solution-finding, communication and collaboration skills using as many resources as we can in the short time we have together. This week's assignments are to start keeping a daily journal. It works for many people to write first thing in the morning about whatever is on their minds upon waking. They write about dreams, plans for the day, past arguments, what they'd like for dinner or what they're reading in this or other classes. It doesn't matter what you write about nor whether its clear or grammatically correct. It just matters that you discipline yourself to show up consistently to examine your own thinking. At the end of the week you will post a four-sentence paragraph summarizing your daily writing for the week and see how classmates have used the discipline in their lives, making sure to respond to at least two of their posts. Next, you will select three themes of literature and include them with your introduction. I have uploaded a file of themes since the link to the website seems to be unreliable so you can disregard the mention of three lists in the Welcome announcement & voice memo. After that, you will begin reading and taking notes on the first assigned reading, Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, so that next week, when the Reading Journals are due, you'll be ready to post your thinking about it. A sample reading journal from another literature class will be made available shortly. I recently took a break from teaching Black Writers to design and deliver a course on Migrant Writers as our world continues to shrink and our survival depends on our ability to see each other clearly and work together effectively. Our stories, after all, are fundamentally the same. I hope this helps. I will post it on the course blog in case someone else would like to hear the instructions again or said differently. Looking forward! Dr. Laing Urbina

What We Believe

I recently discovered that I began "writing" at the age of two, when my father would sit, with me at his elbow, each week to write my mother a letter. Apparently, to distract me from distracting him, he would set me up with pencil and paper of my own. To this day I love a good writing instrument and the paper I write on has to have a certain texture and sound. See, shortly after my second birthday, I do mean shortly because the first letter I have written by a family friend to my mother at a New York address is dated October 31st, nearly two months after my 2nd birthday and written exactly on hers, legend has it she left Jamaica to pursue an education... I inherited this and other letters the week after my father died which was two years and two months after she died. Odd that it's only now, editing this, that I notice that symmetry. In any case, the night before I was to return to Vegas from my father's memorial service, my little sister pushed a familiar and well-worn box of stationery across her dining table to me. She said simply, "take these, you're the writer". Then she went upstairs to bed leaving me there with what felt every bit like the unexploded munition that it was. There were a total of 44 letters in that box. Forty were from our father, two from her mother (our Grand), one from a family friend, and another from one of our mother's school-to-work friends. It took 13 months and NaNoWriMo to open the box again after opening it that night only to have one envelope disintegrate in my fingers and discharge its contents - a "letter" from me and a drawing from our older sister. Even as I noted the signature on my letter, your loving daughter, Kay, the only portion assisted by our maiden aunt, (also the only potion intelligible), I thought to myself, this explains a lot. Anal, doormat, and arrogant are among the nicer names I've been called over the years which I share here to say, it's the words we believe and that we tell ourselves that matter most. I may be any and all of those by turns, but I teach writing /English / literature, whatever the way I do on purpose and to alleviate the feeling of being trapped in a history beyond my control. For me, the act of writing is a liberatory practice - one that I feel everyone should engage daily if not more often. If you come to agree with me, you will do it beyond the time it is required for your grade. The more we write, the chances improve that the record about us will be amplified with our own voices and not just the fragments and figments others entertain about us. I've got more to say about this and a few other topics of interest, at least to me, but now it's your turn. In 500 words, preferably less, answer the following questions: Why do you write? Is there any corrective testimony you'd like to offer to set the record straight? What impact has others' writing (or NOT writing) had on you and or your life as you know it? And how might we make this course, this summer about you, about us, if we cared enough about the details to make it so?

"Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company." ~ Lord Byron

For Starters

There is no 'right' time to write. There's only the time it takes you to dispense with the excuses, distractions and if-onlys, get out of your own way and get down to the business of writing. For what it's worth, I write because I'm a word squirrel. I am simply compelled to stash words in as many places as possible - blogs, journals, email, images. It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that I do it. I don't have a particular use for the words I hide or even a particular audience in mind when I squirrel them away. I just feel the need to do so. Sometimes, in the process of writing, I figure something out. It may be something related to what I'm writing about, or not. Often not. Similarly, cajoling or converting those of us who think we're not writers into writing is something I have to do, for survival's sake. It often feels that urgent. So, take my advice, invitation, example - if you've got a finger and some sand - write. If something worth sharing beyond the intimate circle of your mirror or kitchen appliances emerges, great! If not, write anyway.