When my freaky teenaged friends and I got too old to go on kids’ writing courses we started organising our own. At first we hired youth hostels and dragged in authors to teach us stuff, with limited success. This culminated in the year we spent an entire week watching Doctor Horrible’s sing-along blog on repeat and the lead organiser had a breakdown halfway down the stairs. No one did any writing.
We had a rethink. We decided in future we’d teach ourselves.
Surrealism
Awesome things about KWE 2012!
1. Five participants, five totally different sessions.
Self-teaching works for a few reasons: it’s cheaper than hiring someone, it means everyone is terrified of delivering their own session so they actually listen to everyone else, and as everyone knows different stuff you get LOADS of variety.
Here is this year’s selection:
(i) Surrealism and cut up poetry
(ii) Reimagining Shakespeare – as a Disney movie! or a rap song!
(iii) Fractals – putting texts through sets of rules until they become meaningless
(iv) Characterisation – creating characters based on superficial objects then imagining they are totally different people from how they appear
(v) Exploring the Cumbrian countryside and totally experiencing Wordsworth’s Romantic Sublime. Read more…