by Ellie Cameron People like to laugh. We laugh at jokes on our phones, we laugh at characters in sitcoms, and we laugh with our friends telling stories to embarrass each other. I think it’s safe to say that the average person picks up some sense of comedic timing simply by consuming comedy.
So why do we feel that we can be funny, just not in writing? Is it lack of confidence? Is it lack of skill? Is it the lasting trauma of high school writing classes? Or is it a matter of context?
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by Rebecca Green
I was hesitant, but I knew my students deserved the opportunity to write about themselves, to be creative, to take risks and not feel restricted by strict project expectations. I prepared them as best as I could: we spent weeks close reading, responding to sources, discussing our topics, and partaking in creative free-write exercises as a class. We talked about writing as a process, instead of a five paragraph formula. When that fateful Friday night arrived in which students were expected to hand in their essays, I sat by the computer anxiously waiting for a disaster to take place.
by Courtney R. Hall Celebrity memoirs and autobiographies are nothing new. They act as a fruitful branch of a celebrity’s branding arsenal and are a cash cow for publishers. Spanning decades, it’s been a commonly held belief that many, if not all, of these memoirs were written by an unnamed third party, a ghostwriter. These publications would be seen as a piece of PR material created for super fans, full of fluff like a celebrity's go-to salad that they would consume daily on the set of the television program that made them famous. However, there is a shift occurring in the world of celebrity memoirs and those with fame taking control of their own narrative. Some celebrities have raised the bar for what constitutes a great celebrity memoir in an era where social media blurs the distinction between privacy and publicity and shortens the gap between stardom and the unfamous. In a post #FreeBritney culture, the public is aware of how destructive and misleading both the paparazzi and media are towards celebrities, especially those that are women. Fans are tired of being spoon fed fluff. What they now crave is authenticity. by Lesley George I’ll admit—I have spent hours skimming through fanfiction, picking the perfect tag to fit into the hyper-specific story I wanted to read: friends to lovers, fluff, slice of life, alternate universe (AU). There is something euphoric about being able to find a story so acutely tailored to my tastes; the only thing that could ruin the experience for me would be a misuse of a story tag [“Please use story tags correctly!” I cried]. Tropes and tags are a staple within the fandom realm and exist to satisfy the fans desire for curated content, made by other fans, involving their favorite characters. But can these markers exist outside fandom culture? by Skyla Everwine The most punk-rock thing I did this semester was stand in line at a UPS and try not to cry. It wasn’t the basement shows or broken guitar strings, but being at UPS at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday. I had but one task: to print nine pages, double-sided and in color. And then do that until 50 more times. It was the fourth or fifth printer I had gone to in order to print the zine I was making. I had learned that commercial printers were hellish portals to untamable frustrations, and that making the project for my Self-Publishing course with Dr. Jason Luther was far more difficult than it needed to be. I had turned what could have been a single page mini-zine into 36 pages of digital and hand-collaged interviews. |
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