Heard today that my proposal has been accepted for the Pedagogical Panel of the Association of Writing Programme Conference, the biggest network of Creative Writing in the States, and so the world. It’s a great opportunity to give a talk, but much more importantly it’s a chance to network with writers/academics of the same sort as myself throughout the US and maybe beyond it, and to start up partnerships.

So hooray, and so on…but the hard work starts now. Here’s the proposal, if you’re interested: 

Synesthetic Games: A Thematic Practice in Creative Writing and the Writing of Drama?

 Kandinsky and Nabokov were its sufferers or beneficiaries. Fischinger tried to reproduce it in his animations. Real-life experience of the crossover between the visual, the written, the audible and the tactile has sometimes been brought to art. Can synesthesia be brought to techniques in teaching?

 The University of the West of Scotland offers degree programes which use creative writing including the writing of drama for the screen and the stage. Pictorial, musical or enacted stimuli are used to provoke, encourage or startle original, high-level pieces of writing from students. The recently established Creativities Research Group examines how these stimuli operate within the arts, especially in places where music, hypnotherapy, writing and art can overlap.

 The use of ‘triggers’ has long been a staple of creative writing teaching. Almost always, students willingly produce in response pieces of work that are at least competent and tap deeply into the individual’s subconscious. A similar process takes place in teaching drama, where initial exercises take the form not of writing but of enacted moments, of improvisation, of miniature scenes. In all cases the sense of experimentation, of play – of there being infinite possibilities within a set of rules – is strong. These games lead to larger pieces of work that can in turn become important to that individual’s life, the process of multiplication resembling in many respects Conway’s ‘Game of Life’. How much more powerful might these games be when based on more than one stimulus at once in different media? Can we, by bringing the senses together, develop a powerful educational tool, and should we?

 At a recent workshop at the European Affective Education Network Conference some synesthetic games played with an audience of volunteers produced an astonishing effect. Some were astonished, all were moved, some wept. Simultaneous stimuli in games engaged at a deep emotional level and enabled productive work: the workshop members, perhaps, were able to “feel deeply and think clearly at the same time” (Pat Barker).

 This paper argues that a thematic approach towards game-playing in the teaching of writing and drama with synesthesia as its basis can provide teachers of creative writing in all its forms with an educational tool that is powerful and coherent. But is that level of deep disturbance with a class of students always advisable? And what other uses, such as the teaching of games narratives, and perhaps even the teaching of creativity itself, may it be put to?

We had a great night at Tchai Ovna on Friday 13th November. Two students – Mark Johnstone, BA  Film-Making and Screenwriting (1st year), and Kirsty Crawford, Masters Creative Industries Practice – enthralled a packed house of 50 or so readers, listeners and friends. Kirsty, assisted by fellow Masters-student Ian McEwan, enacted a scene from one of her plays (she’s won prizes for them), while Mark read a story about an embarrassing classroom incident which (fortunately!) did not take place in UWS.

Also reading were Andrew Raymond Drennan, whose novel ‘Cancer Party’ published by Cargo Press, is selling extremely well; Alan MacGillivray, who regaled the audience with his poems about the flying hooligan F.N.C. Gull; Graeme Fulton, who has just been signed up for three poetry collections; Stuart Campbell, who launched ‘RLS in Love’ on Sandstone Books at the event; talented short story writer Helen Nathaniel-Fulton and up-and-coming poet Liz Brennan.

That’s what the event is for: bringing publishers, writers, readers and students of writing together, and letting whatever happens happen. Many students from my Creative Writing and Scriptwriting classes were there too.  Let’s hope some of them read in future!

This month’s reading on Friday 13th November will feature one UWS student, Mark Johnstone, as well as widely-published writers Graham Fulton and Alan MacGillivray. Mark is a promising student on my Creative Writing Module. Lots more to come from him I think.

Two independent publishers – Cargo Publishing and Sandstone Press – are launching books at the event, Stuart Campbell’s ‘RLS in Love’ and Andrew Drennan’s ‘Cancer Party’.

Here’s the flier:

Come along to

The “Reading Allowed”

Reading

at the

Tchai Ovna Teahouse (West End)

42 Otago Lane

Glasgow

G11 9PB

0141-357-4524

Friday 13^th November 2009, 8.00 pm

Featuring:

Graham Fulton

Mark Johnstone

Liz Bassett

Helen Nathaniel-Fulton

Alan MacGillivray

Stuart Campbell

Kirsty Crawford

David Manderson

Andrew Raymond Drennan

plus guests

Live music by Wing and a Prayer

All Welcome

Just heard tonight that I’m presenting a reading/paper at a ‘Determining Creative Practice’ symposium at the University of Bedfordshire on 2nd December. I’m pleased – I have to keep doing these things regularly to learn and to keep up the profile. Anyway, this one’s bang on what I do. Here’s my proposal (a contradiction in itself, considering what my book is all about): 

Losing the Body: Determining Creative Practice

‘Lost Bodies’ is a novel successfully written for a PhD at the University of Strathclyde which has won prizes at the Cinnamon Novel Award and the Yeovil Literary Festival, financial recognition from the Scottish Arts Council and widespread applause at professional readings in Scotland, England, Ireland and New York. Its author David Manderson, novelist and academic, will read extracts from this work of fiction that deals with creativity, determinism and predestination.

The actions of his main character illuminate the fact that the core origin of creativity within the individual is formed socially, and that there may be ‘bad’ creativity just as there may be ‘good’. The conscious process of the main character is just one part of what he knows, his reasoning for his actions, the story he thinks he is telling: he is unaware of, or determined not to see, the compartments of his mind that contain the rest. His determined path – his plan, his proposal, his predetermined ‘art’ – is destructive because it is not about discovery but about what is thought to be already known, and the site of this un-creativity is the body.

The fiction stands as a metaphor for the determining of creative practice. When do proposals go bad? When they are too closed, too impervious to penetration from the outside, too rigid? When the proposal creates a barrier between the creativity inside an individual and those to whom it might apply? When pre-determinism stifles what might be? As the main character continues to commit evil acts for no reason he knows or cares to think of, he illustrates the absurd proposal that determining and creating are the same thing. When is a plan no plan at all?

As a lecturer in creative subjects I’m constantly in the supposed divide between practice and theory: the debates, the issues, the arguments…and very boring they are too. But kind comments by one of my work-buddies, Gordon Gibson, about this essay (which is about the writing of a short story called ‘Inkerman’) has made me slide back up to it again. 

A phenomenological approach to the creative writing process? Possibly…Take a look at it if you want (it’s on the appropriate button down the right hand side) and decide for yourself.

Happy reading!

Two students in my Creative Writing class last year achieve publication – both with stories written for the class.

Paige Hughes and Erica Cochrane, two rising stars, and not the only ones from that group. Look for them in the future!

You can buy the ‘Rob Roy’ book at this outlet, if you’re interested. It’s selling well, apparently!

http://www.amazon.ca/Rob-Roy-David-Manderson/dp/0948877944

We’ve been joined at the uni by a new Royal Literary Fellow, Franzeska Ewart, replacing Catherine Czerkawska, who I thought was irreplaceable. Franzeska’s great though, a well-published children’s author, interested in shadow puppetry and lots of other things. Here’s a link to her blog, where yours truly makes an appearance. Thanks Franzeska! One good link deserves another.

http://www.franzeskaewart.com/weblog.html

This Scotnote by David Manderson, Lecturer in Creative Writing and Screenwriting at the Ayr Campus – the latest in a prestigious series written to promote the teaching of Scottish texts in schools, colleges and universities – was recently released at a major conference hosted by the Association of Scottish Literary Studies. 

It takes as its subject the 1995 film ‘Rob Roy’ directed by Michael Caton-Jones, produced by Peter Broughan (also a lecturer at Ayr, teaching Producing) and starring Liam Neeson, Jessica Laing, John Hurt, Brian Cox and Tim Roth. It is the first Scotnote based on a film. Illustrations are provided by Angelica Kroeger, a Digital Art student in the university.

David has been commissioned to write another Scotnote on Bill Forsyth’s ‘Local Hero’. 

The ‘Rob Roy’ Scotnote is available from Amazon at £5.00 or in national bookshops.