By Renee Whalen
“Ekphrasis. A vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art.” – Poetry Foundation
Any English major at UC Santa Barbara — and most American universities — may well be familiar with this word. The term ekphrasis is taught in introductory English courses at UCSB, which are attended by students of all different majors.
But this vocabulary word has taken on an entirely new form in UCSB’s course, Catalyst Writing. Originally a literary arts magazine club, The Catalyst magazine now offers a four-unit course at UCSB, providing creative collaboration as a means to fulfill the unit requirement.
As a fourth-year Cultural Anthropology major, I took a risk enrolling in a creative writing course during my last year of college. After all, my only academic writing experience had been scientific, research-based writing. But for the fall of 2019, I made a conscious decision to expand my writing experience from the rigid boundaries of academia as I had always known it.
The Catalyst Writing course offers a space for full creative freedom. Students work from a place of personal expression, wanting their published work to be an accurate representation of themselves. In doing so, students are actively applying ekphrastic techniques to their fellow classmates’ artwork.
Each quarter, every student is paired with a partner and both individuals produce an art piece and a written response to their partner’s piece of art. The final layout is the synthesis of one student’s visual art and another student’s written art. Each page embodies the ekphrastic synergy of each student pairing.
There is a sense of seriousness to the production process, as students are granted autonomy over their own layouts. The course is supervised by English Professor Brian Donnelly and managed by a team of student editors. But students are given entire control over their creative writing process.
Stepping into the classroom for the first time, I was terrified at the thought of sharing my personal writing with a partner, let alone an entire class. In my eyes, I was surrounded by a room full of ‘writers’ and my lack of education in creative writing would become acutely evident.
I was flooded with ‘what-ifs’. “What if I don’t use fancy words?” “What if I don’t know about different forms of poetry?” “What if I don’t know how to write poetry?” All of these doubts disappeared as soon as we were given our first written assignment, which didn’t include any fancy words or complex English-major verbiage or guidelines. The prompt was as simple as one word: Write.
The lingering weight of academic pressure swiftly lifted away. It was not that I had given up on myself or my effort in this course. Rather, I was gladly relinquishing my role as a student in academia in order to embrace my role as a writer.
Creative collaboration replaced the all-too-familiar hierarchy of academic competition. Before writing my first piece for the magazine, I was not concerned with how to structure my writing to fulfill a certain prompt. Rather, I was focused on how to express myself and inspire my audience.
Taking scraps from my personal journal entries, I produced a stream-of-consciousness poem that transparently reflected my raw thoughts. The poem is titled, “Awakening From My Nap,” and it paints a scene directly from my summer journal:
“Sand crystals vibrate in every crevice of my body,
and I am reminded of the weight of my bones and the texture of my skin.”
After reading my poem, my partner created a collage with hues of orange and pink to evoke the feeling of warmth after awakening from a nap.
It is now several months later and I enrolled in the Catalyst Writing course for winter quarter and I plan to take it for a third time this spring. Although it is my last year of college, I no longer view this course as a ‘risk’ within my limited schedule.
For me, the physical application of ekphrasis within the Catalyst Writing course at UCSB shifted the monotonous production of student writing into a colorful art form.
Renee Whalen is a Senior at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Cultural Anthropology. She wrote this personal blog in her Writing Program course Journalism for Web and Social Media.