It’s been a while since I wrote about a class I’m taking. I just started a six-week-long online class, “Writing the Other,” led by writers Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford. It’s tough for me to fit a class with my work schedule, my interminable commute, my writing, daily life, and just plain recovering from all this. But six weeks doesn’t seem too long, I think I can do this.
The class text is Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, an inexpensive purchase as an ebook and one that can also be used for self-directed learning. We also use the essay collections curated by Jim C. Hines, Invisible and Invisible 2.
The instructors have gathered a collection of interesting links, but I’ll leave it to them to share their class material as they see fit. However, I had done my own gathering ahead of the class (including articles by the instructors), so I’d like to share those articles with anyone interested.
- The National Center on Disability and Journalism (NCDJ)’s style guide for writing about disabilities.
- 12 Fundamentals Of Writing “The Other” (And The Self), by Daniel José Older.
- Transracial Writing for the Sincere, by Nisi Shawl.
- Diversity, Appropriation, and Writing the Other, by Jim C. Hines.
- Appropriate Cultural Appropriation, by Nisi Shawl.
- Should white people write about people of color?, by Malinda Lo.
- The “Other” Histories of Fantasy, by Phenderson Djèlí Clark (and several other entries on his blog).
In addition, I would like to share a few tools I find useful in completing the assignments, for the benefit of classmates and others:
- ePub to mobi converter, since I do my readings on a Kindle.
- Converting words to pages, to help gauge the length of writing projects and assignments.
- Online timer, which can save multiple timers for you and let you sync them.
- Zotero, very useful for assembling your sources, available as add-ons for Firefox, Chrome, and standalone.
- TV Tropes, a good place to check whether you’re venturing where everyone has gone before.
- Lorem ipsum dummy text generator, useful for layout work.
Image Credits: “And to become what the other look on . .” by Jef Safi, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).