Title: When the Outside World Becomes the Classroom
   
Header:
Finding creative inspiration in landscape is an experience professor Gail Wronsky, Ph.D., extends to students in her Road Write and Street Write courses.

Feature:
A unique advantage to Loyola Marymount’s location is its access to all types of expansive and breathtaking geography from wetlands, to coast, to nearby downtown Los Angeles. Professor Gail Wronsky, Ph.D., came from the East Coast and embraced this dramatic change in vista. She found her own poetry transformed in language and content.

Finding creative inspiration in landscape is an experience Wronsky extends to students in her Road Write and Street Write courses. Offered in the fall, Street Write marries the traditions of workshop writing with service for others. Students attend teaching and writing workshops and apply what they learn in surrounding schools. "Students go to parts of the city they wouldn't ordinarily visit… Most of the students feel wonderfully enriched by their experiences in these places--feel that some of their preconceptions have been drastically altered, find that poetry can be found where they didn't think it could be. Many of them discover that they really enjoy teaching.”

Road Write, taught in the spring, brings participants to Southern California locales that inspired the greats, like Steinbeck. Wronsky values the way this course gets students out of the classroom and into nature. She notes a particular difference in writing from students when they are placed in the mountains, beaches, or even city streets.

This connection between geography and writing is one the English professor incorporates into her own poetry as she works in a little cabin behind the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon. "I find the boundary issues here endlessly fascinating---the boundary between wild and civilized, between ancient and modern, the way you can feel the presence of the Tungva Indians as well as eavesdrop on conversations between actors and screenwriters. Topanga seems to contain all of these contradictions in a kind of vortex which I experience as creative energy." 

Wronsky's most recent collection, entitled Poems for Infidels and published by Red Hen Press, expresses her commitment to freedom. She's also working on a translation for Alicia Partnoy, Chair of LMU's Modern Languages and Literature Department.