ENG 218 - The Art and Activism of the Journal as Creative Writing (1)

Are you ready to venture on a Journal of a lifetime? Journal Writing may change your life as you learn to talk to yourself on the page and to write as a form of deep thinking. Diary/Journal-writing is at last coming out of the closet as a serious genre and work of art. Yes, journal/diary writing is an art! We will read theoretical work that places the journal/diary in that light, and examine diaries/journals by brilliant writers and artists who chose the form and shaped it. And we will write our own, using new strategies/prompts that take us out of our comfort zone and into the risks and thrills of art-making. We will celebrate diaries and journals as art as we learn their theoretical and conceptual complexities. “When the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?” Virginia Woolf queried; the journal form, open, experimental, with no rules-and with a complex narrative structure, cries out for experiment and analysis. We will dive deep into the top French theorist of the diary, studying Philip Lejeune’s On Diary, and reading at least three significant diaries/journals using a variety of conceptual frames. As we go, we will research and study the aesthetic, theoretical, and personal choices a diarist/journal/writer negotiates, and develop individual artist’s statements for our journals. Expanding our journal techniques and approaches, we will write in response to dozens of prompts, and will workshop entries we select on occasion. Will we limit ourselves to words? No! Photographs add a brilliant burst of energy to the journal and may also serve as prompts. Collages and inclusions are welcome. We will incorporate art-inspired by a zoom art session with Consie Powell, artist of a dazzling array of writings she names “her books” rather than “journals.” We will glean inspiration as well from several books on Art Journaling and learn how to do suminagashi (Japanese “floating ink” marbling) and Japanese stab bindings. This course is pre-approved for transcript notation in the Ingenuity in Action category, Creative Expression. To participate and earn notation of completion on your transcript, please complete the Ingenuity in Action application.
(Fine Arts)