Our 3-week Short Fiction of Stephen King class wrapped up late last week with some really phenomenal student projects. As their final project in the class, students choose one of the King short stories we have read and develop their own creative interpretation or adaptation of it. I intentionally leave the options open, with students proposing and developing their own projects, in a medium they enjoy or are eager to explore. In addition to their own creative project, students write a reflection on their design process and their project’s connection to their chosen story, and our final class meeting is a showcase of student presentations of their work. 

Past classes have taken some really innovative and creative approaches to this assignment, including set designs for theatrical productions, Lego dioramas, a set of crocheted coasters, fashion sketches and makeup designs, original artistic and musical creations, and more. At this point, I have a pretty good collection of past student work that I’m able to bring in to share with students when we start discussing the final project, so that they can see concrete examples of how others before them have tackled this challenge and start to craft their own vision and interpretation. 

In addition to using those previous examples as templates for the different types of projects they could potentially develop, this semester’s students also seemed to take this library of past projects as a challenge, with many of them going in totally new directions and taking creative approaches that no previous students had done, including a dioramas of the church from “Jerusalem’s Lot” (in the 1978 Night Shift collection) and “The Raft” (in the 1985 collection Skeleton Crew) that used very different mediums and aesthetics; an original song—including sheet music—inspired by “The Boogeyman” (also Night Shift); and unique clothing designs based on “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” (in the 1993 Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection) and Creepshow’s (1982) “The Crate.” 

This semester’s students really went above and beyond, thinking outside the box and beyond the page to create some really remarkable projects that I’m excited to share with you in the posts to come!