Next semester, in Creative Nonfiction, I’d like to work with my students to create an online creative nonfiction magazine, starting with blogs in Wordpress Multiuser and eventually transitioning into a blog/magazine hybrid format.
Now, I tried this whole online magazine thing once before, and it didn’t work quite as well as I wanted, due to admittedly half-assed course design and execution.(1)
But this time I’m really going for it.
The first thing I need is a good title for the journal. I want something that doesn’t sound “schooly” (as this journal will be public, not classroom-based). It can indeed be cool-sounding or even completely random. It’s gotta be catchy enough to get would-be writers interested.
Here are the online nonfiction journals whose titles I know, with their various degrees of coolness(2):
Brevity
Creative Nonfiction
Etude
Fresh Yarn
Salt
Seven Seas
Any good title ideas?
(1) I’ll be detailing the implications of “fake apprenticeship” processes in a paper for Tom and an upcoming conference presentation… more on that soon.
(2) Please note, however, that all of these journals are decidedly “printy”—that is, they don’t take advantage of the fact that they’re on the web. So these are models for the title, not the format. The edgy Six Billion is probably closer to what I want to do, although I’m looking to do something smaller in scope and more open to non-professionals.
EDIT: Just checked my feed reader. Everyone blogs on Sunday, don’t they?
November 26th, 2006 @ 11:15 pm
Rob Dickinson Magazine.
November 26th, 2006 @ 11:35 pm
Spew.
To really come up with a good one, I think you need to define what type of writing you hope to see posted by your students. Topics, or overall goal of the web site. What do you wish to accomplish with it?
November 27th, 2006 @ 12:05 am
Hmm… Spew. Would they like it?
I think I’m going to define the writing more by frame than by topic. Here are three (out of 150 or so) prompts:
And so on. Sometimes the prompts will be more open than these (and won’t provide much regularity anyhow: since the journal will be open for submissions from anyone, writers can choose to submit unrelated pieces)… so I’ll end up with as many topics and approaches as exist, say, in the Creative Nonfiction journal. So yeah, it’s hard to say what the theme would be. Maybe I should have the students name it a few weeks into the process…?
November 28th, 2006 @ 12:48 am
Pidgen ; concern, responsibility, or area of interest or expertise
November 29th, 2006 @ 10:13 pm
Chicken Sink
November 30th, 2006 @ 10:47 pm
Heh… and the schmaltzy stuff could be called Chicken Sink for the Soul.
December 7th, 2006 @ 12:08 am
You said the idea didn’t work so well with the first class, So that doesn’t happen again maybe you should provide your students with some examples of blogs you consider good so they know what to strive towards.
December 7th, 2006 @ 3:53 am
I think that’s excellent advice, and I’m hoping to do some serious blog examination in the first few weeks. There seems to be a lot of people who blog their own CNF in lieu of submitting it somewhere (with varying success).
But as I’m writing about the experience, I find myself making a different argument: that my students had problems because they were good at blogging. What I was asking them to do wasn’t blogging; it was some weird hybrid of blogging and academic writing.
I think this is something teachers do all the time: create a writing situation that looks in some ways like a real-world situation, but that has undergone a design revision to shut out some of the messy details of the real-world genre in order to keep it controllable and assessable for the sake of the classroom. The result of that process (which I call intermediation) is a limbo somewhere between school and the outside world, and students quite understandably never figure out how to approach it. I think that might have been part of my students’ problem: they weren’t really writing blogs, they weren’t really writing academic writing, and they weren’t really writing traditional creative nonfiction. But I was pretending, badly, that they were doing all of the above. They saw right through it.
I’m hoping this new project turns out differently since the magazine is much more real (i.e. more embedded in the world of the Web and bearing all the features of similar magazines “in the wild”). The “classroomy” part of the project will be the fact that they’ll move from peripheral to full involvement in the magazine (legitimate peripheral participation, one of Paul Matsuda’s favorite terms)…
December 7th, 2006 @ 4:21 am
Man, big chunks of text are hard to read in these comments, aren’t they? I just increased the font size.
/blog-twiddling
December 7th, 2006 @ 6:38 pm
what you said makes complete sense. I know when I write it’s always harder when I am writing for an assignment. I’ll just bet all the blogs from the previous class either came off as stiled and fake sounding, or they were half assed blogs with no real effort or inspiration.
The first one is like trying to act normal when you feel anything but. You can’t be normal when you are only acting out the idea of normal.
December 7th, 2006 @ 6:43 pm
PS. yes. It is very hard to read large blocks of small print on a computer… the pixels tend to blend. I know we all live in the computer age now, but I’d much rather read print. Unfortunately it is only interactive in my head.
and PPS.. you’ll have to post a link to the site all your readers can harass your students … oh, and i tooootallly mean that in a nice way….
December 7th, 2006 @ 9:28 pm
I certainly will, as I’ll be trying to get everyone else to send their students there! :-)