It’s day 1, week 1 of the 2016 ArtWorks Creative Writing/Digital Storytelling cohort. The cohort consists of 11 student interns (selected from the visual and performing arts cooperatives) interested in telling their stories in digital format. From blogging to creating short documentary films, each intern will design their own innovative project. We will meet for 3 hour sessions 3 days a week over the next 4 weeks. During that period, they’ll bring their projects to life.

So far, I’m already impressed with the interns. Many of them are actively publishing their original stories on digital storytelling apps. Some are already blogging. I’m excited. Let’s see what happens.

For now, here’s a collaborative story we all wrote today called, “The Exquisite Story”. This exercise works like this. 1. sit in a circle  2. each writer begins a story by writing the first line 3. everyone then passes the story they started to the right 4. add one more line 5. repeat steps 3-4 until the story returns to the person who began the first line 6. add a title 6. perform.

Here’s the story I started:

1,001 Oceans 

Once upon a chicken, there was a goat who lived in a boat that had a black hat on its head.  It was a blind goat oblivious to the world around it. He lived in a large farm stretched out across acres of land with strange animals from all over the world. But not just the world–the universe. Like a 3-horned unicorn. It was so pretty I never seen an animal that looked so gorgeous. I couldn’t even see them as meat, they were people. I fell asleep and dreamed of oceans. Waves hitting my feet. Sand under my butt. I cried.