Story Lab: EmpoWord

I've been seeing good feedback from students who have chosen the EmpoWord option for Story Lab already this semester, so I wanted to write up my own notes and also collect some notes about the open textbook project at Portland State which produced this book.

Here's the main link: EmpoWord: A Student-Centered Anthology and Handbook for College Writers by Shane Abrams, Portland State University.

This chapter is so useful for my classes, especially for students not already familiar with some of the basic vocabulary that helps us talk about the choices that all storytellers are making. The author, Shane Abrams, uses a really careful, methodical approach to the different dimensions of narrative writing. The chapter focuses on personal narrative writing, which is very different from what students are writing for this class... maybe over the winter break I will write an EmpoWord "supplement" where I can map the ideas and observations from this chapter to the kinds of traditional storytelling practices that are more the focus of this class, and provide some models of student writing to go with that, just like this book chapter does! The author has done all the heavy lifting, and I would just need to add some additional material prompted by traditional storytelling forms and some examples of how my students either work with those traditional forms or modulate them into the kinds of more modern narrative styles that are the focus of this chapter.

The opening of the chapter on storytelling is so cool, with those four meditations on "We're all stories, in the end." Inspired by Doctor Who's Steven Moffatt, which makes it even better (I dream of writing Doctor Who fan fiction...). I especially appreciate the one that takes the "in the end" part seriously: when we live our lives we are living in the present tense... but that present flips to the past and in the end (of our lives, of episodes in our lives), we are telling about what happened in the past. Here's a link to this specific page for a full-sized view: what a great way to hook readers right from the first page!

"Writers struggle with a scope that is too broad." (link) That is especially the temptation when people are thinking in terms of movies and novels. But if we could think in terms of jokes and fables, it would be easier! That is my aspiration as a writer. I like short things... even though I tend to make the short things I want to write too long ha ha.

In example on p. 39/91 I far prefer the pigeons taking flight version to the first-person version. No surprise there because I really don't like writing in first-person... in fact, I don't think I've ever even tried to write actual stories in first-person, although it is by far the preferred choice among my students when they write. But I am fascinated by POV: I think it would be so cool to take a great classic novel (one in the public domain, free to remix and reuse) and show how it would work as seen from the POV of different characters, with all the limitations that each POV entails. Not written in first-person, but with strictly limited POV.

Dialogue. These writing exercises look really cool! Maybe I should do an EmpoWord follow-up where people do these exercises...? YES. I just updated the Story Lab options to include this EmpoWord follow-up on dialogue (that is something students often find intimidating; I think these fun-sounding exercises could help!).
* The Secret p. 50/102
* The Overheard p. 50/102
* Beyond Words p. 51/103

And now I want to collect some useful links to this project in general; I learned about this book totally by chance to Twitter, and I am so impressed by the book itself, and also by the platform. Apparently faculty at Portland State University have written 20 of these open textbooks! I wish my school would do something like that (after the layoffs last week at my school, which come after years of money squandered on ill-conceived digital initiatives like Janux, I am so angry... and thinking about the REAL work of value we could have done instead in digital education makes me even more angry... but that's a separate subject).

Here's the book link itself:

EmpoWord: A Student-Centered Anthology and Handbook for College Writers by Shane Abrams, Portland State University. As you can see from the URL the content is being hosted at Portland State. You can download OR read online.

And look at this spectacular list of all their other books! Wow! Especially this one: Korean Through Folktales. I repeat: WOW!

Here is the software platform they are using: PanOpen.

Plus, I found this article online about the Portland State project: Creating an Open Textbook Publishing Program: Inside PDXOpen by Karen Bjork, Portland State University.

Seeing this project really inspires me. When I retire (which, if these layoffs continue, might be sooner rather than later...), I really want to write a book like this, a truly useful open textbook for a general audience. Thanks to Shane Abrams (whom I cannot find at Twitter, so I need to send him an email) and to all the people at Portland State who made this open project happen!