Getting Creative!

One of my course participants, Brigid Bose, wrote a piece for the newsletter of the Association of British Women In Malaysia about what goes on in my creative writing classes at Learning Works :

Next Courses

I am starting my creative writing course for beginners Getting Started - Finding the Flow again soon at Learning Works in Bandar Utama. Two time slots are available for this 10-session course:

Tues 10.30 a.m.-12.30 p.m. (start 6 July)
Sat 10.30 a.m.-12.30 p.m. (start 31 July)

I am nearing the end of the first run through of a new second-level course called Who Are you?  Somebody!  which focuses on writing from personal experience, and above all on writing honestly.  It's been a demanding journey and I'm really happy with the work produced by the group so far, and feel we've come a long way. 

More courses and workshops are planned (including ones of writing craft) and I am so happy that Eileen and Dennis have given me a base to work from so that I can develop what I am doing. 

We (and here I also include library saint Daphne Lee!) have now put small library in place so that we can encourage our writers to also be readers.

Learning Works have much more going on, and there are some exciting developments in the pipe-line.

My Writing Workshops

I have news of other writing workshops locally ... and the first one to talk about is mine!

My course Getting Started has found a new home now, and I am very excited at the prospect of starting up again with two new groups in February. I haven't usually announced to the world when my courses were taking place (well, kept secret!) because the British Council put the word out for me, word of mouth was working its magic too, and we more people wanting to do the course than I could fit in since I keep the group size small.

Now Eileen and Dennis of Learning Works have offered me space in a very pleasant and newly renovated house in Bandar Utama, just a short distance from where I live. The feel of a place is very important to me, and without wanting to go all touchy-feely on you, I just felt that the vibes for creativity were right!

You can read about Learning Works here, and find details of my course here. Please can you pass the news on to anyone you know who might be interested?

One of the courses I'm starting is in the daytime, which should help me to tap into a whole new market.

If this works out well for me, I have all kinds of plans for other classes I might teach.

Learning Works is also going to be the home of Daphne Lee's workshops and I will put up some thing about her workshops in another post.

Writings from the Dark Side

Terri, from my British Council writing group, sent me this yesterday:

Sharon,

Do you ever feel like you can see directly through people when you read a few pieces of their writing? I imagine you must. It's always their inner voice speaking somewhere beneath the adverbs and the plots.

The excerpt below really made me think about the role teachers play in the lives of their students. Not just writing teachers but all teachers ...

A Virginia Tech professor told NBC News that Cho’s creative writing was so disturbing that she referred him to the school’s counseling service, but he would not go. The professor, Lucinda Roy, the English Department’s director of creative writing, would not comment at length on Cho’s writings, saying only that in general they “seemed very angry.”

“I kept saying, ‘Please go to counseling; I will take you to counseling,’ because he was so depressed,” Roy said. But “I was told [by counselors] that you can’t force anybody to go over ... so their hands were tied, too.” Fellow students in a playwriting class with Cho also noticed the dark and disturbing nature of his compositions.

“His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque,” Stephanie Derry, a senior English major, told the campus newspaper, The Collegiate Times “I remember one of them very well. It was about a son who hated his stepfather. In the play, the boy threw a chainsaw around and hammers at him. But the play ended with the boy violently suffocating the father with a Rice Krispy treat,” Derry said.

It's easy to be wise after the act, but weren't the clues to his later behaviour all in place?

Should I be worried when my own creative writing students harbour dark thoughts of murder?

(And to Terri, does your writing show a way into your soul? Oh yes, all writing does!)

Update:

Thanks Chet for pointing the way to other links which discuss Cho's writing. This article from CNN tells how renown poet and author, Nikki Giovanni, immediately suspected Cho when she got word of the shootings. She said that she had found Cho's poetry was intimidating, and his behavior so menacing that she had had him removed from her class.

And AOL News has acquired two of his plays from a Virginia Tech student.

Required reading at this point in time - of course, DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little which will remain just as relevant as long as history is allowed to repeat itself by courtesy of US gun laws.

Postscript:

Blake Morrison on the Guardian blog writes:

... in truth, the plays are no more violent than Shakespeare's. In fact, despite their banality, Shakespeare is arguably a key influence ... many theatres have staged bloodier dramas. And if creative writing programmes excluded students with personality disorders, they would all have to close down.

Cho's literary experiments neither caused his psychosis nor purged him of it. Psychoanalysing them for clues to his behaviour is a pointless distraction from the underlying cause of the massacre: American gun law.

Writing Crap and Loving It

Started classes last night at British Council. This group is larger than my last, and quite wonderful in its diversity - a broad sweep of ages (early 20's to late '60's), races, nationalities (Malaysian, Indonesian, British) and professions (including engineers, a hip-hop musician, a housewife). Despite this, they seemed to gell very quickly and didn't get too freaked out at the apparently loony things I got them to do ("Don't think! Throw grammar punctuation spelling out the window!")

I always find it fascinating just how much new writers block themselves by telling themselves "This isn't very good...", "I'm not very good at ...", "I can't write as well as the rest of you".

Just have fun guys. Write crap! Write the worst crap in Malaysia - the world even. Just write tons of it. Send that in-your-head-critic over to KLCC for some shopping, and only invite him back at the end of the course to help you polish your work.

The irony is, of course, that once a writer claims that freedom, some pretty exciting stuff turns up on the page. And there were surprises even in the first session.

Many thanks to my friends at British Council for advertising and organising the course and taking the admin burden off my shoulders. And I love the off-the-library classroom with its whizzy computerised white board.

Life is also much much easier now that I have someone to help me out on a flexible, part-time basis. Doris is gradually taking over all the routine tasks (photocopying, typing lists, keeping records) which frees me up no end. Best of all she is genuinely interested in what I do and is already making very good suggestions for how I can work more efficiently. (I need that as I'm not the most organised, as you will have gathered!)

Yep. Things are going well.

Creative Writing as Therapy

Apparently you have to go and pick up copies of MPH's free Quill magazine yourself these days, but the little magazine has grown a little thicker, has more articles and is printed on much nicer paper this time round.



This issue has my article on the benefits of creative writing (p29). Among other things I touch on is the use of creative writing as therapy.

One very interesting fact is that in one study by the Academy of Management in the UK, unemployed professionals who were given the opportunity to write about their thoughts and feelings surrounding job loss, were found to be reemployed much more quickly than those who did not!

Creative writing honours the individual and boosts self-esteem, and writing workshops around the world have given a voice to battered women, the bereaved, the elderly, the sick (particularly cancer sufferers), and disadvantaged groups.

Would love to run "writing for therapy" classes and wonder if anyone out there knows of a group who would benefit? I have done some reading about the running of such groups and have been in touch with a woman who has run groups for cancer sufferers in the States. The most inspiring text I've read on the subject is a chapter called Using Writing to Empower the Silenced in
Writing Alone and With Others by Pat Schneider who runs course for low-income women. Many of her former course participants have in turn gone on to teach the same courses to other women, and some have had their work published. And just claiming for themselves the space and freedom to write gave these women the strength and encouragement to find other ways of turning their lives around. Inspiring stuff!