[creative writing and new media campus week]

This week, four weeks into the Online Masters in New Media and Creative Writing, is an opportunity for all the students to get together and meet each other in real life. Yesterday was their first day, a chance for all to catch an English breath and today they're all hard at work giving presentations. I've had the lucky chance to participate as a second marker on the presentations which have been incredible. As we break for lunch, I'm able to grab a moment of thought to ruminate on the presentations and then after lunch we'll finish with the final two presentations.

This morning I've learned about writers. Not writers in general, but writers, dreams and creators who are very specific entities. Thinking about the presentations is making me reconsider my previous thinking that I might be able to group "writers" and "readers" and individual groups (though of course some may blend between both groups). Based on the the writers/creators this morning, there is no such thing as "writers" but rather "a writer" in a singular and sense unique to each creator. Everyone today has been influenced by different people, occasions, thoughts and feelings. Poignant, for Barrington Salmon, is the role his mother (mother, worker, creator, chef, inspiration) in his poetry and stories. Leo, instead, finds creativity in the work of Rollo May, Daniel Pink, Banksy, Ken Robinson and more.

Melodie Daniels spoke about not liking The Old Man and the Sea, but interestingly she doesn't like it precisely because of Hemingway's gift with language. She, like me, doesn't want to be stuck out on the boat with the old man who was "thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck" (http://www.scribd.com/doc/21616/The-Old-Man-and-the-Sea). Even though Hemingway's language, at least in this story, is "spare and compact," everything is so vivid. Hemingway's language makes the reader feel there, in the boat with Santiago.

"The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of the way they made their living, were born, educated, bore children etc. ...I have tried to do something else....I have tried to eliminate everything necessary to conveying the experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened."

nb. the image on the right of this post is a scanned in version of Melodie's first poem.

Sukai Bojang is also interested in language but she's focusing more on the oracular version. Recovering folk talks and translating them into English, Sukai is hoping to not only reach a different set of readers, but also to pass on cultural artifacts and help literacy rates in The Gambia. One of her inspirations is Chinua Achebe.

Still to present are Tia Azulay and Jaka Železnikar. I'm looking forward to hearing how and if South Africa has had an impact on Tia and her writing. I'm thinking of Andre Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, Nadine Gordimer, Mongane Wally Serote and and and...