Voice and Vision (creative class number three)

(yes, I know I have not yet written posts on creative classes numbers one and two, but a girl has to start somewhere!)

During the 2013-2014 school year, I had the privilege of designing and teaching a class with a good friend, Janet. Our class focused on ekphrasis, with which we played pretty fast and loose, broadly defining it as the creative act of responding to an artistic work with an original artwork in another genre. So our students spent the year composing poems in response to photography (and vice versa), writing flash fiction in response to Gothic images, performing spoken word poetry in response to the course as a whole. A study of avant-garde architects evolved into building models of libraries that incorporated “signatures” of those architects. We visited cemeteries and the home of Anne Spencer, a poet significant to the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia. We criticized Alexander McQueen’s Baroque Angel Shoes as too fussy but adored Iris Van Herpen’s Water Dress. We called our class Voice and Vision, and we all had a fabulous time!