Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Seminar on a topic in World Literature. This course may be repeated for credit when different topics are offered.

COURSE DETAILS:

Title: 1001 Ways to Tell a Story 

Short description 
A creative writing course on the power of compelling storytelling, ranging from ancient oral traditions to podcasts, film, and the sonic storytelling of DJ’s and hip-hop artists. 

Course outline 
Storytelling is one of the defining features of the human species. Humans have always longed to know where we come from, why the world came to be, and why things are the way they are. And so for millennia, we have sat around fires, gathered under trees and in hillside amphitheatres, weaving stories that account for the unseen forces that shape our lives. This is at the core of storytelling. Today, it is our often our fictions that define us, our ability to generate and believe in a collective story. Our stories can be large and existential (the many creation myths the world over), but we also create more functional fictions – the concept of money, or the concept of the nation – that allow us to operate on common ground. Stories also inspire us to act, to drive societal change, and inspire us towards common goals. 

This course will take students on an exploration of storytelling techniques and go to the heart of what makes a compelling story. We will meet (in person and virtually), a range of gifted storytellers from around the world, from DJs who create new language through sampling, to award-winning radio hosts who reinvent oral storytelling techniques, novelists who break the rules and visual artists who tell stories without using a single word. 

The course is delivered through a combination of classroom lectures, creative writing exercises, and local field trips. Students will make field trips to the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver International Film Centre, and to a radio station or podcasting studio. Students will be required to write brief reviews of each field trip, documenting their learning of different narrative techniques. Students will be expected to produce two original pieces of creative writing through the course - one at the beginning, and one at the end as a term paper. As this course embraces a variety of narrative techniques including oral and visual storytelling, students may submit their creative writing piece in written format, podcast (spoken) format or as a graphic novel or short film - subject to approval by the Writer in Residence. 

Together we shall explore how stories can help us find freedom and new spaces to dream. In a world facing a crisis of the imagination, how can we protect what Wade Davis describes as ‘the old growth forest of the mind’?

Grading

Materials

RECOMMENDED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: