The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
| Writing Game A D VENTURES INT HE COMMUNITY As a class or writing group, devise a project for your local community. Remember you are part of that community, and you may wish to involve other members of it in its planning and delivery. Create a writing project that takes off from some issue that concerns or attracts many people. This might be something historical, political or social. It may even be sparked by something geographical, or special to your region like a dialect or the local names for things. Allow the project to run for one week at least, and work with as many people on their writing as possible using a site that is open and accessible, such as a public library. Try if you canto produce a small publication from the project. Share this with the participants and give it free to local people. Use the expertise of new people you have met to devise further local projects. A I M Such projects are locally empowering and can be fun. They can have far-reaching effects for the individuals involved, even to the point of making some of them reconsider their lives and become writers. The process will affect you, too it will make you think even more clearly about your own writing and the kind of audience you might need to create for it. The grassroots of creative writing However, some people work as writers in a community because, unless they are very lucky or very ruthless, many find themselves needing to. Talent has nothing to do with luck, and being poorly paid for pursuing an art will not always be their fault. There are ways to get by during these stages, although for many writers these are not stages but entire lifestyles. A freelance writer can only earn so much by their writing, and working in schools and the community will allow you to earn time for your writing. However, teaching community writing will feed you, in more ways than you might expect, including your own creative work, a matter exemplified by the many contributors to The Point: Where Teaching and Writing Intersect (Shapiro and Padgett, 1983 ). Earning time for writing seems a fair payoff fora pursuit whose process is its own reward. Community writing makes you stay in touch with different audiences; it keeps your feet on the ground and your head in the world. That is why some creative writing programmes present opportunities to develop a project outside college, with a community group or in a workplace. The success of these projects is assessed as part of the degree course. Community writing also returns creative writing to one of its first causes, pleasure. There is nothing so delightful as a class of eight-year-olds clamouring half-rhymes and triolets, or performing stories you have helped them to discover. However, this work is not simple – it requires training. You are not a Writing in the community and academy 239 teacher, but a writer in education. You will have to work to gain their respect, and the best way to do this is to be yourself, and prepare your workshops thoroughly, and above all unpatronisingly. If you let it, working with a community will feed your writing. It will open your eyes to things you may have missed in your own experience, or to matters you can expect to meet yourself, as a person and as a writer. The poet Kenneth Koch taught creative writing regularly to schoolchildren, but also to older people in a nursing home in Rhode Island. He knew the obstacles of such a project, but he sensed possibility he sensed how the pleasure of writing could itself be a serious thing for them to work at, something worth doing well and that engaged their abilities and their thoughts and feelings. Even so: Most were in their seventies, eighties and nineties. Most were from the working class and had limited education. They had worked as dry cleaners, messengers, short-order cooks, domestic servants . . . Everyone was ill, some people sometimes in pain. Depression was frequent. A few were blind, and some had serious problems in hearing . . . To be added to all of this was their confinement Yet Koch, working with an assistant poet, arrived with no preconceptions aside from an idealistic view that, since he loved writing poetry so much, and gained so much pleasure from the process, he imagined everyone else would it is such a pleasure to say things, and such a special kind of pleasure to say them as poetry ( 1997 : 6). Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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