Hi Drop Inn writing project pioneers...

Here's where you'll post your 300 words' worth of notes from your visits to the Drop Inn Center. Your posts will be used (collaged and borrowed from in lots of different ways) by your classmates as they create their final writing projects, which will be bound in a book we'll design together (you'll all get copies, as will the Drop Inn Center).

You should have received an invitation from this blog that will give you instructions for how to post. Let me know if you didn't receive it, and please post within 2 days of your visit to the Drop Inn.

What should your posts contain? Try for raw material! details and language we can use in our writing projects later.
- lists -- what signs you see on the wall at the Drop Inn; the people standing outside; what food is served; what the people are wearing; anything that might summon the scene for a reader in an unusual way
- dialogue, overheard and/or participated in
- what you see: clothes, the scene, the people -- details
- anecdotes
- things that might surprise people who haven't been on the scene (what surprised you?)
- research and statistics on homelessness or other issues that come up during your visit -- you can do research on something that attracts your attention, as long as it's relevant to what goes on at the Drop Inn Center, and post interesting findings here.
- images -- it's fine to post images along with your 300 words, or to make a visual piece out of your words and other visual material and scan it.

Make your post lively and succinct, and use any form or format that suits what you're posting.

Do try to avoid cliches and familiar language or attitudes or opinions, ones you think you might have heard or seen before. Also steer clear of evaluation, judgement, moralizing, moaning about the sad fate of the world or people in it, etc. It's easy to fall into language like that when faced with difficult issues, and we will definitely be faced with them.

Let's shoot instead for getting a lot of interesting details and bits of language and information up on the blog and we can figure out later how to process them into something that feels like an artwork to each of us.