Each semester now, I begin my creative writing courses with a writing laboratory. Using signs, glass jars, and other sensory items, I set up stations around the classroom that allow students to experiment and free write. I vary each station’s instructions slightly depending on the genre of the class, but I have found this to be an invaluable way to get students generating material for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.
One wall hosts the image station. You could check out art prints from a local library, but I more often print out images that are available online. Surreal paintings and tension-filled photos work well. The station sign might ask students to describe one of the images, to imagine what’s happening just outside the picture, or to write out what the image reminds them of or how it makes them feel.
One desk serves as the word station. I use magnetic poetry, but you could easily create your own word cutouts to scatter around the table. The station sign might instruct students to write a brief paragraph using five of these words or to choose one word and write anything that comes to mind through free association.
Another desk serves as the scent station. I place objects with familiar scents into glass jars. Ground coffee, grass, vanilla, and orange peels work well. This station sign might invite students to write about a memory that one of these scents conjures or to describe a scent by comparing it to other things.
It’s a good idea to encourage students to spread out and to suggest time limits for each of these brainstorming stations. I call out the time every 10 or 15 minutes, but I always tell students at the beginning that they’re welcome to stay at a particular station if they’re writing productively and don’t want to move. After we’ve had enough time for students to experience each station, I urge them to transition to the final table and then return to their desks so they can start to organize their writing. This last table is the revision station. For poetry, the sign provides students with a list of possible forms and suggestions for using them. For fiction and creative nonfiction, this sign instructs students simply to look over their notes, pull out some of their favorite material from one or more stations, and start drafting a story or an essay.
My students create drafts in the laboratory that they are excited to share with each other afterwards, and they can then take the sense of play and the methods of observation from the lab and apply them to their writing process throughout the semester and beyond.
I’ve most often done this writing laboratory with college students, but I’ve also used it with junior high and high school writers at a library; it can be adapted to fit any age level or group size. Adjust the details of my stations or create new stations to meet your group’s needs and interests—perhaps a tactile station with feathers, fur, silk, and other materials to touch; a sound station with a variety of recorded noises; a question station in which students write only in questions to interrogate someone.
Whatever else you do, experiment and write alongside your students. In this laboratory, your own engagement with writing should be contagious.
–
Katie Manning is the founding editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and an associate professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman, and her first full-length poetry collection, Tasty Other, is the 2016 winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award.