PENs (and PENcils) in the Classroom

On the USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences web page, right next to the astounding news of Dana and David Dornsife’s tremendous gift to the college, there’s an article about Master of Professional Writing students who are teaching creative writing in Los Angeles schools.

MPW has partnered with PEN in the Classroom (PITC), a project of PEN Center USA, to offer internships to MPW students who are interested in serving the community and gaining teaching experience.  PEN Director of Programs and Events Michelle Meyering, a PITC veteran, recently spoke on our Writers Who Teach panel.  An internship class taught by Ebony Cunningham and training from PEN help the MPW students develop classroom skills and effective approaches to teaching.

In the fall, Justin McFarr and Kristen Abbott taught a twelve-week creative nonfiction class at Film and Theater Arts Charter High (FTA), and this spring Krishna Narayanamurti and Amie Longmire are teaching a multi-genre course (including “memoirs, monologues, dialogues and the importance of revision”) at West Adams Preparatory High School.  Each class culminates with the publication of the students’ work in an anthology by PEN.

These anthologies, by the way, are beautiful and moving.  I first saw one when MPW Director Brighde Mullins joined the PEN board last year.

Read the whole article: “Discovering Their Voices,” by staff writer Ambrosia Viramontes-Brody

MPW at AWP

Hello!  I would say that I’m liveblogging AWP, but I think I need Prince to come and publish this post, and right now he’s attending Dinah’s “Faith and the Writer: Inspiration and Practice” panel (which is based on her MPW panel of the same name, only this one has Askold Melnyczuk, Brenda Miller, Dani Shapiro, and David Biespiel).  Everyone else also had a panel that couldn’t! be! missed! so I am sitting at our table, which is in Exhibit Hall A, #G47. We are here for all three days of AWP, and we have books, copies of the Southern California Review, and information about the program.

We also have a raffle! Today’s prize package:

• A copy of faculty member M.G. Lord’s book Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll.
• A copy of the novel/short-story collection/novel in short stories Ms. Hempel Chronicles, by last week’s visiting writer, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum.
• An MPW t-shirt, featuring our awesome “wings” logo.
• A bar of USC chocolate.

We also have some nifty USC pencils to give away to passers-by, and Howard thoughtfully went out and stocked up on mini chocolates to sustain you if you are passing our table and suddenly feel faint for lack of chocolate.  I know it happens to me at AWP.

Harry Potter and the Screenwriter’s Puzzle

In the run-up to Friday’s opening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, the New York Times has a piece by Sarah Lyall on screenwriter Steve Kloves, who has adapted all the Harry Potter movies except Order of the Phoenix (which was adapted by Michael Goldenberg).   The article isn’t exhaustive, but it offers a glimpse of the monumental task of adapting the novels (which become increasingly larger doorstops) to film.  It’s amazing to learn that as Kloves worked on the earlier movies, he had no certain knowledge of how the saga would end.  He tells Lyall that as the series unfolded, he came to believe that Rowling was setting up Hermione’s death in the final book!  (In case you’re not a fan: no.)

The article also confirms what any reader of the series would suspect–that Kloves came to know the Potterworld as well as anyone besides Jo Rowling herself.  “I had a remarkable ability to anticipate events, because I swam in the narrative for 10 years,” he tells Lyall.  But he also alludes to Rowling’s multidimensional imagination: what’s in the books is just “the barest surface of what she knows about that world.”

I was thrilled to be able to see Deathly Hallows, Part 1, with my daughter at a screening on the Warner lot this week, and I was struck once again by how much of that world makes it into the film–not just through event and surprisingly economical dialogue, but through lighting, costume, cinematography, sound,  properties and effects.  A quick visit to the second floor of the Warner Brothers museum reminded us both of how deeply imagined both the novels and the films are.  We saw, among other things, Harry’s cupboard under the stairs (which he revisits in Part One), the Sorting Hat, a prototype for a Dementor arm and hand, and the intricately handcarved Goblet of Fire.  But the thing I’ll remember most is the Half-Blood Prince’s copy of Advanced Potion Making, open to a page complete with illustrated text and handwritten annotations.   I wonder what it cost–in time and expertise and effort, as well as in monetary terms–to make that small part of that film?  (The museum, in case you’re curious, can be seen as a stop on the Warner Brothers V.I.P. Tour, V.I.P. in this case meaning anyone with $48 to spend.)

Michael Goldenberg observes in an interview here that he and director David Yates “both like really dense films which are very generous in the same way the books are so generous, and looked for every opportunity to get everything we could in there.”   Although this one is stark compared to the others–Harry and his friends spend much of the movie in flight or on a quest, and there are a lot of woods, shores, and rocky strands, cold colors and deep shadows–the world will be familiar.  If you’re seeing the film this weekend–enjoy.