- Awareness: Writing and Renunciation

Institution:

The Evergreen State College

Subject:

Description:

Faculty: Bill Arney, Sara Huntington (These faculty gave up expertise in favor of attitude. Take the program or not; don't do anything because someone is an expert. ) Class Standing: This all-level program accepts up to 25 percent freshmen. Attend. Paying attention to how events, people, the big wide world in all its tiny manifestations-how they all appear, how they mean anything, how they engage us-that's what we'll do. We'll attend to the terms of our engagement, the costs, the ways we renounce in order to have a modicum of freedom-a freedom that turns out to be so strikingly different from the freedom that we think about, carelessly, as living beyond restraints, limits, duty. The freedom that is the effect of careful craft, discipline and practice-that's what we want to focus on. We'll write a lot, not as a means of self expression, not to find a voice or a self, but to pay attention, to study, commit, love. "Creative writing requires a dual love of language and life, human and otherwise. The storyteller then sculpts these raw loves with acute observation, reflection, creative struggle, allegiance to truth, merciless awareness of the foibles of human beings, and unstinting empathy toward human beings even so" (David James Duncan). Our inquiry requires attention to ascetic as well as critical practices. We will all participate in mind-body practices, lectio and other communal reading, community service and bookish study. Writing may include socio-historical inquiry, reportage, annotations, comedy, antilamentations, jeremiads, humor, fictionings of the present, manifestoes, confessions, statistics-based scandals, rants, incautious cautions, sightings or prayers, but no poetry, plays or, especially, plans. Students should attend this class for two quarters. This program provides continuity for those students enrolled in previous quarters of Awareness. Total: 16 credits each quarter. Enrollment: 36 Special Expenses: Approximately $35 each quarter for yoga workshops. Program is preparatory for careers and future studies in any area of pursuit where people enjoy awareness on a daily basis, not for the monetary rewards and not for the lifelong opportunities a career or future study might provide, but for the love of being engaged in their work. This program is also listed under Culture, Text and Language. A similar program is expected to be offered in spring 2008. Academic program Web page: Awareness: Writing and Renunciation

Credits:

16.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.evergreen.edu

Phone Number:

(360) 867-6170

Regional Accreditation:

Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities

Calendar System:

Quarter

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