These three volumes present writing and images produced by students in Media Writing: Critical and Narrative Forms during the Fall 2017 academic term. Thirteen class members participated, joining the course from the Documentary Media MFA program as well as from other graduate programs in the Faculty of Communication & Design (now The Creative School).

The course was built around three assigned problems: writing of a critical review, developing a personal artist statement, and completing an extended narrative. New elements incorporated into the 2017 class publication included a hand-drawn portrait of each class member, contributed by Tara Korkmaz, and a new design concept which led to each assignment being printed as an individually bound volume. As in previous years, all students in the course grappled with questions about establishing a balance between personal experience and critical distance, understanding cause and effect relationships in media and culture, and redefining the role of documentary practice in a highly-mediated world. The essays published here show a remarkable variety of subjects and approaches, in combination with great depth of feeling at the personal level.

One participant’s writing provides a good example:

As I grew and had to leave the community for the first time, I had two stories I had to hide: I was gay, and my family had nothing, and I came from nowhere. After years of hiding those two stories, I earned a third story which had to be classified as top secret: I had depression.

In that cave of hidden stories, like the caves in Chauvet, my humanity, my art, was also born. …

To lose your creativity might be to die slowly, but to gain your creativity is to live lifetimes all at once.

Cover and book design, editing, production and sequencing were all done by class members.
Design and layout were done by Daniel Schrempf and Kenneth McDonald, with cover design by Ashleigh Larratt and Daniel Schrempf, and image layout by Delphine Lewis. Copy editing was completed by Dominic Akena, Rachel Bordignon, Donovan Taplin, Gregory Severin, Natasha Ramoutar and Jessica Ramirez Leon. Lysle Hood and Jessica Ramirez Leon contributed design research, and John Verhoeven compiled materials for the Table of Contents and all credits. As mentioned above, Tara Korkmaz contributed all portraits, and the quotation is by Donovan Taplin.