Showcasing: Student Art and Writing Workshop
By Apple Plotnick Jannotta
On Tuesday, February 20, about twenty sculpture and writing students gathered at the Wake Forest Renaissance Center to work in tandem to create original literary projects with a sculptural element. Joselyn Diaz, the teacher for the creative writing class at North Wake College and Career Academy led this event. The writing students were tasked with writing an original science fiction or fantasy story of at least 700 words and the art students were tasked with illustrating something from that story in a novel way. The students worked mostly in teams of 2, with one art student assigned to each writer.
There were about 6 or so literary community volunteers present to help guide and critique the students' work, myself included. Volunteers were asked to sit one-on-one with each team in 5 minute segments and assist them with answering questions, offering guidance, or helping with suggestions to guide each team along their first drafts, and to then rotate to the next table. Most of the student teams had just started their story idea and were working on creating a conflict, developing their main character, fleshing out the visualization of their environment for their art partner, etc. Some teams had not added their science fiction or fantasy element and, as a science fiction writer myself, I enjoyed giving them examples and ideas of how to do that for their individual story ideas. I also helped the teams with their individual Heroes Journeys to ease the writing process down the line.
Most of the students wanted to know how to actually start a story, so I offered individualized guidance to each team based on where they were and what they were interested in writing about. I always like to start writing where I'm personally interested, and then save any extra details on a second sheet to work in later if need be, so I shared my tips and advice in that vein. I was highly impressed with how each team had such different ideas and environments dreamt up, and how each artist had fleshed out original concept images from each story idea. Some teams were building globes to represent Mars, some were doing reliefs of scenes where ivy had overgrown an entire city, and some were still undecided and were working from pen and ink drawings.
As an author, the individuality of each burgeoning writer was interesting to experience across teams. Where one team had a writer who had deeply fleshed out the internal world of their main character, but wasn’t sure where to put them in the world of their story, others knew exactly where they wanted to put their character in their well-fleshed science fiction world but had no idea what their main character’s feelings or motivations were going to be. I mentioned to Ms. Diaz that it might be a good further in-class exercise to put the different authors together to help each other share their strengths and build each other’s skills up even further, and she was excited at that idea.
Overall, the quality of young, talented writers and sculptors was impressive. I really look forward to seeing what they will bring to Wake Forest’s art scene and I’m excited to live amongst such great student talent!
Apple Plotnick Jannotta is a Virginia-born short story writer, and realistic fiction author. Her current Washington State Artist's Trust literary grant-winning work, The Market, is a dystopian fiction novel, which aims to evoke a modern vision of “The Jungle” through a futuristic Amazon-dot-com warehouse-like environment. She has been published in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine and won an ACLU award for her poetry. She is a graduate of Kenyon College, and holds a Merited Master’s degree in International Security from the University of Birmingham. A CIA recruit, she is known for weaving economics and geopolitics into her morality-based fiction. Apple writes from Wake Forest, NC. Reach her at booksbyapple.com.