Author Archives: readdavi
OCSA Career Day Creative Writing Panel
Chapman University, B.F.A. in Creative Writing Program Director: Morgan Read-Davidson readdavi@chapman.edu AACU Survey Panel: Tara Mann is a senior Creative Writing major, a young and new adult fantasy writer, a Lifestyle and Entertainment writer and editor for 60 Seconds, an online magazine, and is the Editor-in-Chief of Calliope, Chapman University’s literary magazine. Emmett Garvey graduated … Continue reading
Becoming Bridge-Builders
There’s a popular term out there right for people with lots of followers and content on social media: “Influencer.” On it’s face it sounds powerful, something we might all aspire to as writers and creative minds, but in practice its far more about internet hits, monetizing popularity, recycling worn tropes, trading shock for likes, a … Continue reading
Write What You Know
I’ve recently started writing a new historical novel, which means wallowing in research of Anglo-Saxon Britain circa the 7th century CE, and my experience so far has brought to the surface some realizations that I’m sharing with both my rhetoric and creative-writing students.
The Trap of the Hyperreal
“Donald, I know you live in your own reality…” It was a line that debate geeks loved, but it may not have been that far from the truth.
Structuralism and Myth: A quick introduction
The opening unit of my Language and Ideology course examines how language—and we can extend the meaning of “language” to include hyper linguistic semiological systems, such as myth—constructs our perception of the world, or better, “reality.” These linguistic systems become structures that shape human consciousness, structures that we remain largely ignorant of. Below is a … Continue reading
The Memory Box
In my Composing the Self class, we are exploring the genre of memoir and the rhetorical frames that we create when writing about memory. The power of the memoir lies in its ability to create vivid moments of identification, those experiences, scenes, and choices that readers can connect to their own lives, or imagine themselves … Continue reading
Identification
Lloyd Bitzer defines rhetoric as “a mode of altering reality…by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (4). To achieve this, the rhetor—or the person composing rhetoric—must be able to connect to her or his intended audience through a shared understanding of symbols: utterances, words, graphics. This connection … Continue reading
What do English Majors do? (my speech at the Sigma Tau Delta induction)
I love bridges. I grew up in rural Washington State, with a creek running behind my backyard, and a river running between my house and everything I needed to get to. When I waited for the bus each morning on the country bridge spanning the small Newaukum River, I always tried to find the exactly … Continue reading
Obama Drama (A pentadic criticism of his sequester statement)
Drama. We love it. Movies, television, fiction, political theatre, sports and spectacle. Life is drama, or at least that is how we make sense of life. The 20th century rhetorician Kenneth Burke saw drama everywhere, saw it as a way that people constructed their realities. While the material world is perceived by our five senses, we … Continue reading
Techne
When we hear the word craft or craftsmanship, we tend to think of the material arts, ie. building something with one’s hands: cooking, carpentry, sculpting, painting, etc. We understand craft to be the method of making or doing, of using specific materials and tools to accomplish specific tasks, and to do so in an aesthetically … Continue reading