April Writer’s Night – Right/Write for Change: One Word and Person at a Time with Brooke Carlson

Although often a solitary affair, writing demands an audience. Writing for change means addressing problems and concerns in and around community. For example, letters to the editor offer many of us just such an opportunity for dialogue. At The Daily Sentinel, in Grand Junction, we’ve got 400 words to start the conversation. What are we talking about here?!?  Street maintenance, park developments, trail conditions…social justice, good living, or even effective governance?

We’ll brainstorm, do some freewriting, and learn a bit about compositional structure and process to produce more effective letters. Our work here can then be applied to writing for the local newspaper, writing to our elected officials, in sum, writing to initiate a dialog and better our community.

We’ll also offer a brief introduction to generative technology via Open AI and ChatGPT, as a way to strengthen our writing as a process.

You’ll want to bring something to write with, be it a pen and paper, a tablet, laptop, or even a (smart) phone.

Note from the WCWF Board: Dr. Carlson was recently selected by the Center of Teaching & Learning at CMU to be the first AI Fellow, and he will fulfill that role in this coming spring term. We think all writers, no matter what you write, will benefit from learning and practicing compositional structure – plus you get to learn about AI – so come on down!

Speaker Bio

Brooke A. Carlson (he/him/his), PhD, teaches rhetoric and composition, literature and Shakespeare, under the auspices of a general education at an institution of higher education. Raised in Colorado, a son of public-school teachers, Carlson earned a bachelor’s degree in English and French at Bowdoin College, taught high school English for five years in Portland, Maine, and then earned a PhD in Early Modern Literature at the University of Southern California. Carlson taught internationally in Seoul, South Korea, and Honolulu, Hawai’i, before returning to the US and Colorado, where he is now an Instructor of English at Colorado Mesa University.