Matters that Matter

Choose a topic that's important for you. Then write a letter to someone who could help you share your ideas, create something meaningful (an event, a product, etc.). Or, write to someone that blocks or restricts you in some way, letting them know about what you care about, and what request(s) you have as a result.

Przykładowe zadanie

Napisz list do nauczyciela j. angielskiego, w ktorym:

• wyrazisz swoją opinię na temat zajęć (co się Tobie w nich podoba a co nie)

• zasugerujesz zmiany

• odniesiesz się do swojego pozaszkolnego kontaktu z j. angielskim

• wypowiesz się na temat tego, co jest dla Ciebie ważne w nauce języka i w jakim celu się go uczysz (np. wykorzystanie języka w praktyce, przygotowanie do matury, itp.)

100-150 słów

Tłumaczenie z polskiego na... polski

Wybierz jedną z fraszek Jana Kochanowskiego. Przeczytaj ją raz po cichu i raz na głos (kolejność dowolna). 

Następnie przetłumacz tekst na współczesną polszczyznę.

Recycling

What do you recycle?

Today's task is suspiciously simple if not utterly boring and unworthy of your precious time and attention.  

But give it a go, anyway. What do you recycle? Start with the obvious, then reach for the less obvious. 

What is recycling? 

Put it into a simple definition. Or use a metaphor if you feel like it.

What do you find in the word linguistically?

What word family does it belong in? What are its kins, the nearest and dearest as well as the distant ones? 

What if all that you've read sounds like trash?

Go for the gold in it or replace the text with something more worthwhile.

The logic (and the intricacies) of a story

Let's start with a close reading.

1. Read the story. 

2. Retell or rewrite the story in a few sentences - keep to what happens (just facts) and leave out the rest. 

3. Read the story again. Don't rush. 

What does the writer let us know by choosing the details (e.g. electric green, I was hunting lemons, spoilt gold, her hair roared red)? 

What do we learn about the characters, their relationship, the surroundings?

What do you discover about how the text sounds?

4. What do you prefer: reading /being told about an event in a literary form (e.g. a microstory, a short story, a poem, a prose poem, a song lyrics, etc.) or just learning the basics of what happened as a matter of fact? Why?

Lemons (by Joy Sullivan)

It was rainy season and everything in the grove was electric green.

I was hunting lemons. My job was to find the ripe among the fallen. I remember the sweet stink of exhausted citrus. Spoiled gold in the heat, how the fruit sweated in my palm. My sister was running past. She was four years older, full of goodness and gullibility whereas I was young and rotten and one for stories.

I used to tell her I’d seen fairies the size of tadpoles in the river.

That I knew a spell to repair lost time. Gullibility is a kind of bigheartedness, I think, and when she finally learned the joke, it always broke her heart.

Snakes were common in the grove, but I remember how horribly beautiful this one was. How it lifted itself, an iridescent arrow.

Mambas are fast and deadly and when I screamed snake, my sister stood among the fallen lemons, swaying slightly, weighing whether or not to believe. I can still feel her eyes searching me, the seconds slipping, the dying sun making her hair roar red. It wasn’t until I wept that she stepped out of the grove and for the first time, I realized what words meant. I saw them clearly-full of either venom or veracity. The dumb plum of my heart split open.

That night, I told my sister I loved her. I told her the truth.

The third season

Welcome to the third year of Wild Geese Creative Writing.

We'll continue good practices and find new ones, I believe, as we go.

Nestle in your notebook, virtual or made of paper, sharpen your senses, relax into the flow.

Grasping the movement

Look around and catch some movement with your eyes - it can be a living thing or an object. Then describe the movement. It can be rapid, uneven, delicate, slow to the point of being almost undetectable, or too fast to really witness.

You can experiment with the layout of the text to add to what you're writing about. 

Here's my example (taken from our school environment):

Squirrel

It was the middle of a class - or was it at the very start - a squirrel! said someone

A squirrel! came from the back row, a-

squirrel ricochetted down

the hall and off it went  -  off

through an open door, and back 

up, up the limbs

of the larch tree where one of us

had spotted her

in the first place -  it was

the end 

of term; we wanted more

of what she had out there

and so

we left the subject to unplot itself,

our hair tangled

with the soft needles

we laughed, and fell down 

as rain

And then

spring

came

It is... like what?

As a way of celebrating Earth Day, choose some part of nature and describe it by saying that it's like something else. Or that it is something else. 

I've chosen a shell.

A Shell

is a shape. It is a shade. A seal, broken. An equivalent of a bone. A home of someone who has left. A spiral. A staircase. One half of a two-part whole. It is a hole and a corridor. A cradle. A microbowl. A pink nail left in the sand. A white shard buried in a dune. A raven's beak's crescent moon. A stamp on the surface of a stone. A necessary stage. A story, lost and found.