Recently, I was asked to run a creative writing workshop. I have the following as my bio and my idea of what the session would look like:
In his photography, holoz0r draws inspiration from the visual style and mythological symbolism of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. His artistic practice explores the fragility and transience of human life. Informed by his Master’s Degree in Visual Art and Design, his thesis examined artistic representations of death, decay, and impermanence.
These themes flow into his writing. He weaves his love of speculative fiction and philosophy together, striving for his work to capture the wonder of Arthur C Clarke, the vivid, existential doubts sowed by Philip K Dick, and the deeply insightful and introspective work of Ted Chiang.
In this creative writing workshop, we will examine Pre-Raphaelite paintings where painting and poetry were deeply linked. Then, we'll craft written responses focusing on the subtle, intentional details that are all present for a reason.
We will then advance to discussing the photograph as memento mori, covered by French philosopher Roland Barthes, before pausing to make a poem that is a portrait.
Finally, we will conclude on intentionality in creativity, where even in a flow state, every word can be curated to extract more meaning.
I was pretty happy with what I wrote ... but it ended up being too long. What eventually got published to advertise the event, instead was the following (not written by me:)
Local author, holoz0r is presenting an ekphrastic session with a twist! Did you know that pre-Raphelite painting had a strong link with writing about artworks. Steven will present content on what inspires you, an urgency to create, and inspiration rather than writer's bloc as to stirring with one's muse...
holoz0r will also be the guest author for the afternoon Poets @ the Pub. Turn up for the morning, chill in the afternoon in listening to others or be a part of the open mike. See if you can win a bottle of wine as well...
[city] - the Colonial Athens...
I packed my suitcase full of my photographs (which were recently exhibited) - and packed it even more full with my collection of books on the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and the work of Roland Barthes, and in the interim, I wrote oh so many notes. I didn't read from them verbatim, but instead, I summarised them into dot points and a structure.
I know for a fact that none of you were at the workshop, but I know that at least two of you would have loved to attend. So, ultimately, here is what my rambling would have looked like if you were in the room at the time I was doing it:
Intro (15 minutes?)
Hello, I'm holoz0r. I am no expert on pronouncing words, or indeed writing them, but I'd like to welcome you to this writing workshop. I am first and foremost a photographer in my creative work, but recently, I have sulked back into the shadows to my youthful dream of being a writer.
A dream I once fulfilled. I've written professionally for video game publications, and for the last ten years, rambled my way through a personal blog full of reflections and introspection, commenting on the state of various things, and continuing to review various media. I'm almost up to a million words.
I took a redundancy from my former employer in April this year, and I've used the time to really dig deep into my creative roots. I've had my solo photographic exhibition, Myth just conclude at Cafe Nova. Nothing sold, but that doesn't matter. I made that work over the course of six years, because within me, there is an undefined, burning force that compels me to create. If I don't - I get depressed. Quite the opposite of the typical tormented individual who produces their best work while depressed.
Speaking of depression - high school!
I wrote a novel in high school called 13 Bullets. I never had the guts to send it to a publisher, and I never typed the thing out. I wrote the bulk of it while ignoring my Mandarin lessons. I chose to focus on English. Interestingly, that was the only time I was ever given a detention in school - for not paying attention in Other Language Studies, owing to the fact that it was not as interesting as the worlds I was creating.
The following year, I wrote a story that became known as "Melanie's Fall", and also, never sent that to publishers. The complete manuscript is floating around on the Internet. I then wrote a story called "Sojourn" as I was starting my blog, ran it to something like 30,000 words, then lost interest. After I read Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke, I realised I wrote almost the same story, only setting it in a cave instead of on a cigar shaped, mysterious space ship.
I've never edited it. More seriously, I am currently writing a bunch of short stories that I hope to collate into a collection of science fiction. Sadly, I will soon have to contend with a full time job which will rob me of my writing time, I suspect. I write everyday.
I have done so many things creatively in my lengthy (for those around me) 38 years, but I have just too many interests. I studied a Master of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Australia and wrote a thesis called "Visions of Death", which studied how Death is represented in various forms of visual Art.
My favourite paintings are those of the Pre-Raphaelite school of artists. They were a group of people who were incredibly dissatisfied with the decline of the academy in London around the 1850s, and produced work through to the early 1910s. They idealised the great painters Raphael and Michelangelo. Their subject matter was often biblical, but was equally inspired by mythology.
It is their style and work that I take into my photographic practice.
Pre-Raphaelites (10 minutes)
But as the invitation for this event led you to believe, the pre-Raphaelites used an enormous amount of text to inform and enhance their work. Indeed, many of them were also Poets. I've brought a few books along on the pre-Raphaelites, we'll use them for some exercises shortly.
Before that, I just want to say, that when this workshop was proposed to me, I had only heard the word ekphrastic used to connect visual art and written prose or poetry once before, yet, it is something that I have done for my whole life. One of my projects at university was to take song lyrics and transpose them into a series of images. You'll find that book, scattered among the others that I've brought here today.
Ekphractic writing is the inverse. We take an image, and we compose something in response to it.
We'll find some images in the books I've brought, or indeed, some of my own photographs that I have brought along, and we can do some writing on them. When looking at this art, I encourage you to look at the small details, and to note the fact that in this human generated work, every detail and every element is there due to an intentional choice.
Write a poem in response to a photograph or a pre-raphaelite painting - (15 min for writing, 10 min for reading)
Have people share their work.
Writing and sharing photography - Barthes 25 mins
Moving on now to the period of time while the Pre-Raphaelites were producing work. At the same time, photography was starting to come about - and Paul Delaroche, famously proclaimed, in lieu of his own talent (and the fact his work is still celebrated today) "From this day forth, painting is dead." If only I could tell him it isn't. Look at the glory of his work, in The Young Martyr, The Death of Lady Jane Grey, and other pieces.
But while Delaroche painted a lot of things about death - be it of the person, or of the empire - it took another French man to come to the notion that the photograph represents the death of the moment, and the death of what it represents at a given time. While it captures the moment, the photograph is a thing that is entirely embodying of death.
Roland Barthes text is stuck in time, fixed in time, and the photogrpah itself history we can't access. The people in all photographs are strangers from a time where we didn't exist. They are also a recognition of a time before we were.
Viewing a photograph is a private thing - not a shared experience. Think of a photograph of someone, a delightful portrait, or a happy snapshot, or maybe the last photograph of a loved one or a pet.
How does that photograph have value, and what is its meaning? What are the small details in it that matter?
Let's write a poem that is a portrait of a person. Think of the elements in portraiture as you do - not only the person's details, but their environment that connects them to the moment they are captured.
An urgency to create (15 minutes)
Time is our most limited resource. I hope, that like me, you have dozens of worlds and ideas bubbling at the surface, wanting to be savoured and tasted. What drives me is my inevitable death. Knowing it will happen means that I have limited time to extract the stories that are in my brain, that swirl in my thoughts, and that stick with me through every waking moment.
When I was learning to code in Python, one of the first exercises was to work out how many weeks old I was. Then the next step forced me to confront my own mortality. What's my life expectancy. How many years do I have left? How many weekends do I have left? While this was intended as a tool to obviously teach the urgency of learning, for me, it was a profound moment that told me that I only had a certain amount of unpromised time left to me, and to make the most of it at all times.
I lie awake at night bursting with stories, then when I seldom get to a light sleep, I dream of more stories and my backlog grows ever longer.
Profound things happen all around us every moment, that go so unnoticed. The mundane is remarkable, because it lets the more complex things emerge. It is in those things that I find myself transfixed, find beauty, and explore lots of little details.
Don't waste your time on the things that don't matter to you. Disconnect from them and move own. Focus on your own creative diet. It is okay to be selfish for your creativity.
My creative diet consists of paintings, fiction, novels, the very ground I walk upon, and the observations I make of those around me. What inspires you? Think about this each time you create work, and don't let anything stand in the way of you and your self expression.
Tagging @honeydue, @riverflows, @shanibeer as relevant to their interests
I really like workshops that are held in non-traditional learning spaces, I think it brings other things. My least favourite is those sterile conference centres on the edge of urban areas, miles from anywhere and surrounded by parking lots. Our local Art History group meets in the Waterloo Room in a pub/boutique hotel in the old, Georgian part of town. It's meant to be the guests' sitting room, I'm not sure what happens to them when we're meeting.
I love hearing the journey of whoever is facilitating/tutoring, too. What's especially interesting about your back story is the, it seems, spontaneous need to create.
I was fascinated to see your pictures from a different view, giving some of them a different dimension. I think the one top left looks especially ethereal, very reminiscent here of early black and white movies and the cropped composition making her look like she's climbing out of the picture:
I was amused that this one caught the reflection of a window, reflecting (!) the empty window space in the image itself. (This is one of my favourites, by the way, it is so lonesome, but I'll write about that another time):
It would be lovely to hear more about your thoughts on this.
I dont know I need to create, only that I must. Misery does kick in when I am not.
Nice noticing on the window reflection, it really does add more to the image.
I might have to get back to you after I've read some more stuff on free will, because without free will there cannot be intentionality. I am certainly not sure if we even have the agency to enable free will.
Hope you're enjoying your retirement and staying healthy on the way to your recovery from your illness.
Thank you, I am very happy: today I walked to the shops in twenty minutes instead of the forty minutes it took me five or six weeks ago.
I haven't thought about free will at all. However, this whole handwritten malarkey has tapped a nerve in me, especially the first draft, only/best draft criterion.
On that topic of free will. Does agreeing to do something for someone surrender your will to theirs? Even if it is the decision to open a door, or sit in a vacant seat next to someone on a train.
Its a complex Web, but as I said to riverflows, I have so very much... too much thay I want to read to further inform my opinions before rambling incoherently through lines of uninformed prose.
Is it a want to read? Will my free will be further sculpted by those new experiences in those awaiting books?
Okay, I was struck by your comment that every detail in a painting (or conversely, a piece of writing) is there intentionally. So that mouse or the autumn leaves in Mariana are there intentionally and have something to say.
Mariana is a beautiful painting, even if hard to penetrate for meaning at first.
Its like the Scythe in Millais' Apple Blossoms. It isn't there by accident. It has meaning, and I think its the whole reason the painting exists.
If you were to crop it out, there would be other pictorial elements that enable meaning, but we require the whole to appreciate the underlying context and intention.
Have read The City and the City by Mieville? It is a really interesting novel about observation and sub and un concious intentionality. Possibly also about the lack of free will...
My train is nearly to the city, so my free will shall be abducted shortly.
I read your review of the City and the City and I got it from the library but they wanted it back before I had read it. Right now I'm deep in psychogeography and the situationists are waiting for me, but Mieville is in my list for a future date.
<3
#notdull #notboring
This was so freaking cool! I would've loved to have been there. Also,
How can you know that for an absolute fact? Maybe someone wore a fake moustache and did a funny accent.
Anyway. It sounds like an absolute blast. I'm sure everyone had great fun. I've never tried ekphractic writing (I fucking hope I wrote that right, but I'm not scrolling up a third time to check xD), but now am quite keen to. Are you looking to run any more of these events in the future? It sounds like you've got a knack for it.
Thanks for the tag! :)
That so beautifully summed up these things I've been contemplating lately. It's certainly refreshing, hearing it from a fellow creative. :)
Just a hunch regarding no hiveans. Yet. Hopefully I could convert a few long term.
Selfishness and creativity sounds like a good thing to write about in longer form. Possible fiction, possible truth. Ill figure something out. I have loads of time on the train now that Im.beimg conveyed toward day two of my job.
I had fun at this writing workshop. I hope everyone else did. I got no complaints other than the "really, we are out of time?"
I wrote a couple of poems on the day, and I think they're good enough to publish ina future post. I so rarely write poetry. It is too dense, and I like giving words room to breathe and intermingle with one another.
The peasant outfit would have been a dead giveaway.
I would love to read some of their poems. I would have been chuffed to be led by such an intelligent and passionate writer with so many interesting things to say.
There is SO much in the mundane. Some of the best passage sin literature have been written about characters in banal domestic moments alit with revelation. We don't need to be somewhere exotic and 'interesting' to write - although that can inspire as well!
Good writing is like good photography. It draws attention to the unnoticeable details we are incapable of being able to normally observe. Then it links them to unexpected things, or takes us on a journey to stranger places. I have too much I want to read.
More Dick, more Mieville, LeGuin.