2024-2025 Course Flipbook v2 - Flipbook - Page 30
SENIOR SEMINAR : CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP
What is the story only you can tell? In Senior Seminar: Creative Writing Workshop, students
participate in a rigorous, workshop-based class to develop their unique voice as writers.
In this course, students read and write pieces in genres including poetry, short stories,
food writing, memoir, travel journalism, and personal essay. By reading model pieces and
engaging in Socratic Seminars, students learn to identify the common craft elements
used by writers in each genre to create compelling characters, tell engaging stories, and
build vibrant worlds. A core tenet of this class is the workshop model, where students
gather in large and small groups to read each other’s work, strengthen their active
listening skills, and develop 昀氀uency in providing constructive feedback to their peers. At
the end of the year, students compile a 昀椀nal portfolio of work that expresses the breadth
and depth of their skills and the unique development of their voice as writers, along with
an artist statement that identi昀椀es the writing in昀氀uences and elements of craft that shape
their work.
SENIOR SEMINAR : SPECULATIVE FICTION
ENGLISH
As Octavia Butler tells us, “The only lasting truth is change.” The only surety in our world is
that tomorrow will be different than yesterday, and speculative 昀椀ction asks us to consider
what our collective future might look like and how our current choices might impact
future generations. In this Senior Seminar, students confront worlds born from the minds
of some of our greatest scientists, philosophers, political theorists, and writers. These
literary giants shake readers awake and inspire their minds to wander years, centuries,
and even millenia into the future. Students travel to other universes, using the structures,
governments, religions, and con昀氀icts presented in the works to re昀氀ect on Earth-bound,
contemporary concerns. We attempt to cover a wide variety of speculative and science
昀椀ction’s central themes: the dangers and opportunities of science, societal critique
and satire, dystopia, human encounters with alien races, and universal/galactic
societies. Our text list consists of a mixture of short 昀椀ction and novels, including
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and The
Martian by Andy Weir. These texts ask students to both deeply analyze and be
creatively inspired, and our culminating assignment seeks to utilize those key
English skills. Students choose between writing an extended analytical comparison
incorporating literary criticism or designing their own speculative world and
writing a story set in that universe. Our central goal is to be intrigued, inspired, and
warned by the in昀椀nite possibilities of the future and the cosmos. Who knows what
we will 昀椀nd out there in the depths of time and space?
INSPIRED
LEARNER
