Julia Pike

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Sample Lesson Plan for Writing & Publishing: Encountering the Literary Journal

March 31, 2017 Lesson Plans, Teach

Learn more about teaching The Common and request a free sample issue.

Discussion Questions:

What is your first encounter with this magazine, as an object?

What do you think about the physical and aesthetic features of the magazine: the weight, the paper stock, the cover, the cover art, the font? What, if anything, would you change?

How do you read it? In order? Piecemeal? How do you think this affects your reaction to the magazine?

How do pieces (poems, essays, stories, images) relate to each other? What is the effect of their placements on you as a reader?

Sample Lesson Plan: Exploring Place through Literary Homage

March 31, 2017 Lesson Plans, Teach

Asking students to create homages to several of the works in The Common Issues 01 and 07 promotes a further exploration of the city in which they live. In fact, it requires it of them.

In Issue 01 of The Common, Ted Conover delivers an immersion essay in which he delves into the past and present of a nearly forgotten road near his home in New England. The first prompt of the semester, therefore, compels the students to write their own Conover-esque immersion essay by walking/exploring a street, building, or landmark in their city or town, seeking out written resources on this place, and gathering up the courage to probe living memory. The second prompt, handed out several months later, encourages them to become creative with what they have so far discovered in their town or city by selecting the works that most interested them inThe Common and emulating these.

Sample Lesson Plan for Personal Essay: Developing Voice, Exploring Roots

March 31, 2017 Lesson Plans, Teach

Assignment:

Using these essays from The Common as inspiration, bring your completely current voice to an exploration of history; write a concise personal essay exploring your personal history or the history of a place.

“Coastlines” by Teow Lim Goh (may also be presented in conjunction with other California authors: Fante, Didion, Jeffers, Hong Kingston, Mori, Himes, etc.)

“The Teak House” by Lamtharn Hantrakul

“The Town with the Golden Future” by Will Preston (Issue 14)

Sample Lesson Plan for Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay

March 31, 2017 Lesson Plans, Teach

Assignment:

Choose an essay from The Common and prepare and deliver an oral report in class on the piece, focusing on an aspect of craft: research, voice, style, place, point of view, and the development of the “I” character, as well as characterization of other characters in the piece.

Adapted from Rebecca Chace, Director of Creative Writing, Fairleigh Dickinson University

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Sample Lesson Plan for a Graduate Level Practicum

March 31, 2017 Lesson Plans, Teach

Assignment: Report on 2 Issues of The Common; select and discuss various, particular elements of the literary journal. 6 pages (1,800 words) minimum.
You will select and discuss 6 items, one from each of the categories below. You must write about at least one item from each issue. Choose from among:

—The Common Statement
— Fiction
— Essays
— Art
—Poetry
—Elsewhere (Bombay/Mumbai, New Poems from China, etc.)

Sample Lesson Plans for Undergraduate Advanced Poetry

March 31, 2017 Lesson Plans, Teach

Learn more about teaching The Common and request a free sample issue.

Group Assignment & Student-led Exercise: Divide students into small groups (trios work well) and give them a week to:

Meet together outside of class with their copies of The Common in hand;
Select, as a group, a poem they particularly like,
Prepare to read that poem aloud to the class, and
Design and lead an in-class writing exercise for their classmates and teacher that is inspired by a technique or aspect of that poem.

The Pennies of Corsicana

February 28, 2017 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

CORSICANA BRICK CO. So say the bricks, cut within an inch of their lives, and the wet leaves like beetles’ wings, caught in the cobbles. We are the bricks’ leaves, they say, under my feet.

The color of the leaves is the color of the rusty railroad spikes that I gathered in the rain. Illegally, it would seem. Property of the train company, I’m told – possessed by others.

February 2017 Poetry Feature

February 21, 2017 Poetry

Please welcome back TC contributors Elizabeth Hazen, Jonathan Moody, Daniel Tobin, and Honor Moore (whose poem “Song,” published in the first issue of The Common, was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2012). We’re also delighted to welcome Gerard Coletta, who is making his first appearance in The Common.

Keats-Shelley House, Rome, Italy

February 3, 2017 Essays

By AMY WELDON

Hoisting our backpacks, my students and I start up a narrow staircase that points us left and right. In November 1820, John Keats and his friend Joseph Severn climbed these stairs to two small rooms above the Spanish Steps, ready to stay until the end, which they knew wouldn’t be far away. Nevertheless, they rented a piano. Getting that piano back downstairs must have been a nightmare. Not to mention the armloads of drapes and rugs, and the sheets and the pillows, and the mattress, stained with sad rings of blood. But it was the law: all movable furnishings of a consumptive’s sickroom, even the wallpaper, must be burned. And then, on a late February day in 1821, would have come the carrying-down of Keats’ small body itself: a twenty-five-year-old man, five feet tall and wasted to the weight of an adolescent, the luminous eyes closed for good.

January 2017 Poetry Feature

January 1, 2017 Poetry

NEW POETS for the NEW YEAR

Please welcome Holly Burdorff, John Davis Jr., Nicholas Friedman, and Matt Salyer—four poets who are new to our pages, and welcome back TC contributor Tina Cane, the new Poet Laureate of Rhode Island.

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