Student EssaysIn May 2007, five MFA students from ASU traveled to Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. Below you will find excerpts from essays written by these five students, along with photographs documenting their teaching and traveling in China. Applications for summer 2008 travel are due November 1. “I came home with a suitcase full of things – prayer flags, a thangka, incense, shadow puppets, airplane snacks I never would have imagined existed. But also with a sense that the world is so much larger and more complicated than I grasped before the trip. Sitting in front of a computer, creating a small world with your fingers on a keyboard, a writer can forget that, can learn to feel comfortable in the confines of her characters’ quirks, of the circumscribed universe of her own making. It is sometimes hard to let other ideas in. China – with all of its bustling crowds, ancient histories, diverse cultures and religions, its shocking ruins, its unusual bathroom facilities, its rows of meat on sticks, its large university in some ways so like ASU and so unlike it at once – was a look inside a place in many ways outside of my comfortable life, the world I have come to know.” “Addressing the students at Sichuan University forced us to really think about the place of creative writing in American universities and in the larger culture—about why we do it, why we think it is of value, to us and to our students, to individuals and institutions. We came up with a mini-lecture to present to our Chinese students, a list of reasons encompassing everything from “a way to express the inexpressible” to “fun.” It’s a good list, albeit one we should theoretically have been able to write in the US as well as we could have in China. But being sent to China as representatives of an American creative writing program at an American university forced us to think about, and defend, the teaching of creative writing in a new way.” “…an example of a lesson we taught our undergraduate students at Sichuan University. Using Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, we pointed out to the students’ the grandmother’s desire to not go to Florida (it is indicated in the story’s first sentence). The story tracks this motive and how she goes about trying to attain it: the means she employs to achieve her desired ends. Our wonderfully bright students were receptive to the lesson, and realized one of the first tenets of the writing of literary fiction: to have characters who are tested over the course of a story’s pages, realizing either what they want, or having it taken away from them, or the sacrifices they make in order to ensure that they get what they want.” “After completing our first week of classes with undergraduate students, I had emailed a friend, “This might have restored my faith in humanity.” What short stories, faith, and sustainability have in common, I’m still not sure, but the sheer energy of our students was something to behold and admire. Just mentioning the word “stories” elicited the same reaction a grand prize would … Our student’s sheer enthusiasm helped me realize what I had taken for granted for years – the creative foxhole that has always been provided throughout my educational career.” "Certainly China has a rich history of culture, and writing is arguably at its forefront ... But the pursuit of writing as a career and life is something many of these undergraduate students have never considered as a possibility." |
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