This spring semester, The Prison Education Project has introduced a new Creative Writing Workshop for MECC students, led by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, a Washington University PhD graduate student.
“Our Creative Writing Workshop is conceived to empower students for a better development of their own fictional and nonfictional writing projects.” – Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
The Creative Writing Workshop works to provide students with a number of classic literary techniques, as well as to foster skills in the practice of literary criticism, helping to create a collective climate of constructive debate and brainstorming, in order to improve each work-in-progress under discussion.
The workshop mainly uses students’ own writings to workshop in class. However, the instructors also use different fiction and poetry texts, mainly classic authors of English language, such as James Joyce’s
Ulysses and Christian Bok’s
Eunoia. These pieces of literature are used as examples to encourage a style of thoughtful, respectful and yet provocative class participation.
The workshop meets every two Fridays, twice a month. Each class is approximately three hours. Currently, the workshop has three permanent students.
“All three students are very talented as writers and very interested to discuss technical and theoretical issues of narrative, although our main goal is to discuss their own stories in a workshop format.” – Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
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