Hit the writing workshop with Kwame Dawes this morning at the National Library and Archives. Workshops are usually pretty entertaining; they throw you out of your comfort zone, and I usually find that there's always one exercise I just can't do, but I do enjoy being stretched.
This workshop was particularly interesting because I think most of the participants were there because of a connection with Kwame, maybe more so than because they were writers. It was a very homey sort of affair, including the fruit, Carribbean food, and coffee brought in by the organizers, and there was a large sense of a shared cultural connection: almost everyone there was in some way connected with the Carribbean. It's certainly the first workshop I've been to where any of the particpants wrote in Jamaican patois.
Like a lot of workshops I've attended, there were a lot of people who said things like, "I've never really written creatively before, but I like to read and I want to try writing." And there were a couple of people who described themselves as writers, and a couple of people who had been writers long ago and for whatever reason had stopped. As a workshop leader, I don't know if I'd know exactly how to tackle a disparate group like that, but Kwame seemed to do a really good job of explaining things so that someone who'd never thought about narrative would understand, and those who were already fiction writers didn't get bored. I think Stuart Ross, who occasionally comes through town with his Poetry Boot Camps, gets a very similar demographic, or at least he did at the Boot Camp I attended a year or so ago.
I think the poetry exercise daunted a few of the non-poets in the room, but some of their work was very powerful, and Kwame made the point that what you write in an exercise like that tells you a lot about what you think a poem is, and that there is no correct answer to the question of what makes a poem. Which is probably the biggest stumbling block people have about poetry; they think they can't write it because it takes knowledge they don't have, while in fact poetry is so varied that you could justify almost anything as a poem if you thought enough about it.
And the first lesson for a workshop newbie? Get rid of the conception that everything a writer writes is something she's going to go anywhere with. I know far too many writers who say things like "I never edit anything," and "I only write when I'm inspired." The greatest lesson a workshop teaches you is that sometimes you have to play scales. Or do drills, or doodle. It's like a boxer skipping rope - he's not doing it so he can go on to become a champion skipper. He's doing it to build up his strength and his stamina. I think Kwame did a good job of making that point. He seems to compulsively speak in metaphors, which works really well with a group of beginning writers.
I wish there had been more time for the exercises, but given the time we had, there was a lot of writing and a lot of conversation; good questions from the participants, good conversations springing up between people at various stages of development as writers, and a lot of interesting cross-fertilization. In particular, I was happy to get some contacts made with Three Dreads and a Bald Head. Here's hoping we can work together.
And I'm wishing safe travel to Kwame as he heads back to South Carolina - I hear there are some massive storms on the East Coast U.S. Fingers crossed that he doesn't have to spend the night in D.C.
Posted by Kathryn Hunt
at 9:21 PM EST
A friend picked me up a copy of Stolen Sharpie Revolution (by/edited by Alex Wrekk) at the Cut-N-Paste Fair in Toronto last weekend (and he paid for it in TTC tokens, which I think I'm going to make into a tradition.) I've been flipping through it. What a great little book. Small, all kind of sexy and bright red, and the inside a crazy mishmash of zine-style layout, typed and pasted text blocks, and great advice on everything from how to make your own silkscreens, to how to publish other people, to how to get into postal art circles, to how to run a zine distro. And a fine resource of (mostly American) distros and small presses and the like. I'm going to be poring over it cover to cover in the next little while. It makes you want to go find your Sharpie and start cutting and pasting.
