Probing for travel stories through collage writing
Students will be guided to probe their own expereinces for travel stories through a writing strategy known as the collage. In his book Writing with Power, Peter Elbow explains how this strategy works to produce creative response. A collage is not a single perfectly connected train of explicit thinking or narrative. Rather, it is a collection of writing fragments arranged poetically, intuitively, randomly without transitions or connectives. Its joints remain invisible. The nature of collage is to invite intuition therefore collage writing invites students to create actively out of their own consciousness. Gaps in chronology are abandoned in favor of glimpses, daydreams, scraps of dialog, meditations and reminiscences. 40
Traditional essays are a loose form of writing with a strong conversational thread that sometimes becomes chatty or associative in structure. The collage essay utilizes a loop writing process. The first step is to do lots of raw writing. Then look through it to find the good bits, polish them up, then, as footsteps on the floor, lay them out before you to find the best order for them. In a collage essay its thread is invisible. You get this implied thread to assert itself as you arrange the good bits of writing in the right order. One often discovers a surprising coherence lurking in a pile of good pieces. 41
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