CREATIVE WRITING AN' THAT

Up until now, I haven’t mentioned how the creative writing workshops have been going. As this was one of the main reasons I came to Palestine, I should give a wee update.

There were some delays in getting groups set up, partly due to issues such as university timetabling, but for the past month or so I’ve had two groups up and running, one with local volunteers at Project Hope and another with English students at An-Najah University. (Hopefully, I will have another group starting after Eid with Al-Quds Open University.)

Both of these groups have been going well. Whenever I’ve done creative writing workshops in the past, I’ve always been worried that someone will be a really bad writer and I’ll end up struggling to say nice things about their work, but thankfully this has not been the case here. Even though everyone has been working in a second language, the quality of the writing has been really high. In addition, I’ve received some good feedback from participants so, all in all, I’m very happy with how things have been going.

Up until now, I have been just encouraging people to write, giving them a starting point or certain topics to write about. After Eid, I intend to look a little more in depth at “What is a poem?” and “What is a story?” (The answer to both questions being: “Whatever you want them to be?”) Part of my methodology is to encourage people to abandon traditional, or taught, notions of what defines poetry or storytelling and in doing so to find their own voice. The English students don’t learn any poetry more recent than T.S. Eliot, so I’ve enjoyed introducing them to contemporary poetry such as some of Edwin Morgan’s more experimental work. You can almost hear them thinking, “but this isn’t a poem”.

The chances are I won’t get enough “finished” work to put together a publication, something I had originally hoped for but always thought might have been a wee bit too ambitious, but there will be work published online at some stage. I will keep you posted.

In my first workshop with the An-Najah English students, I did an exercise where I asked them to chose their favourite words or phrases. Below are their responses.

hero

ambitious

Palestine

Al-Quds (Jerusalem)

freedom fighter

procrastination

sister

mouth

xerox

martyr

success

fabulous

boycott

bullet

 “ahlam” (dreams)