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What helped me most with my learning process this semester was the emphasis on collaboration and peer review, alongside your encouragement to use our own voice and develop forms of writing that work toward the content of our writing. Additionally, I found the way you planned the assignments out to be very helpful. Though it was a lot of work, it never felt like it was going to crush me, it was paced out very well. Alongside pacing it out well, you also checked in with us frequently; having drafts due consistently made sure that I was on top of my projects, so I never experienced the stress derived from procrastination. However, it did help that this was my favorite class: I never felt like procrastinating on my animated writing work. Beyond all of that, I really loved a lot of the writers and writings we were introduced to in this class, many of which I took inspiration from--especially DiPrima and Maso.

I think what helped me most in the class was having content that was riveting, which I could derive meaning from in intersection with the prior knowledge I brought to the class, in combination with a form that was the right blend of flexibility and control for my personality.

Getting work done in this class was never burdened by stress or anxiety...I always felt excited to do the work for this class...sometimes, toward the end of an animation I would feel stress or anxiety about the resolution to it, or the inability to do with it what I would like to within the time constraints, but maybe that just shows that I am becoming more of the kind of writer/teacher Sirc describes in the article you made available to me: a constant reader/writer/reviser, my work developing a strong life inside of me, giving birth to countless visions and revisions.

SHRT & LNG ANMTNZ: FNL VRSN

For your viewing pleasure:

Lines

&

Girl Island

Love,

Erin

The Last Break-up Poem I Hope to Ever Write

Yesterday afternoon, as I walked to my Wednesday evening class, I wrote a poem in my head. I was thinking about how "writers" might process an ended relationship differently. For example, someone who is into astrology might say "I should have known the moment s/he told me s/he was a Libra. Air and fire is a dangerous desire." (And I did say that latter part...in a song I wrote while waiting for the bus in 2007--"his wind will blow your flames so wide, from yr heart's burning no one will be spared/others said there's more fish in the sea/he said 'don't risk yr world for me'/but I'm not a fisher of fish/I'm a dreamer in a jaded skin/and I let you in I let you I let you in.") I have determined in retrospect that this relationship was completely unworthy of such eloquent, poetic measures.

So, anyway, I was thinking about a sign that is maybe more important: who their favorite author was. In the instance of the specific relationship I am talking about in my new super romantical poem, this is especially important. So, here is the last break-up poem that I hope to ever write, a goodbye to the genre, if you will, as I do not wish to ever separate from the sweet prince I currently run with.

America

1 Dec 2009
for Nikki Wallschlaeger

"What is Left" by Cherrie Moraga

What I Have Learned in This Class

This class has been very a much needed reinforcement of my ideas, strategies and abilities. I feel like everything I wanted to do I was allowed to do, that I was encouraged to have my voice and to develop it, from start to finish. It was very refreshing to be able to write how I want to write, in the way which is most effective in my eyes, which feels the most true to what I am saying, without the distance of the academic voice and inevitable lapses in the transmission of meaning it creates. This class has helped me realize ways to engage others in writing, as well as to incorporate technology into my future classroom in radical and innovative ways that I can sorta get behind...though I still don't think I will ever take students to a computer lab without first fostering a discussion about electronic waste and groundwater pollution and how it disproportionately affects people in less developed countries who cook their dinner in the same pots with which they melt down metal from computer scraps. (Gotta gotta get up; get down.) You (Anne) have proved what I have always thought might be true: that the best way to teach is to create a space that people want to create in. Thank you.

Response to Final Project Feedback

People like the way the text flows...the making of a word and the remaking of a word by adding a letter or two. (It is totally true that I never realized the phrase "I can" is contained within "American" until I made this project. Fitting.) Others dream of expatriation, think the wooden womb cutout works perfectly because something that is carved seems so much more permanent, which is what "the fatherland's" mothers seem to want for their daughters: "an American identity that is permanently carved into our skin." People like the images used to illustrate the text generally, think they work well...want me to consider keeping the images up longer so viewers may contemplate them. Others dream of expatriation and would like to come inside my own. How very flattering...they think my animation works well to support my writing. :D Yaaaaaay.