12 July 2022
This week’s session of Crow’s Nest was our last before summer, which we celebrated with sweet snacks (see above). It started with the prompt to describe our previous week as a liquid and a solid (throw a gas in there if you want). Responses included:
Ice that melted because it’s very hot
A Sprite (it’s all that I drank this week)
A single slab of determined chocolate within a melted pool
A water bottle (because you need one)
The melted corn syrup interior of a Stretch Armstrong toy
A garden statue of two cherubs cradling a waterwheel which turns as they spit a stream of fresh water into it
Antosh went to a youth summit last week where he saw presentations in the style of ‘a pecha kucha’ – where 20 slides are commentated for 20 seconds each. This reminded him of a collection of short poems in the style, by Terrance Hayes (see below).
To prompt the creation of our own short poems, we were given a list of titles, drawn from previous prompts this term or snatched from conversation in the session so far. These were:
Liminal Hours
Ghost Friend
A Pause In Time
Seasonal Decisions
Clone Houses
No Randomness
The Past Is Better Than The Day You Are In
Aftermath of a Flashback
Half-Person, Half_____
She Does Not Scream At Hauntings
A Bridge Salesperson
What We Talk About When We Talk About Limbo
An Unexpected Delivery
On The River Bend...
Antosh then introduced to another poetic form, Zuihitsu, by a poem of the same name by Jenny Xie.
Antosh commented on how Jenny physically interacts with the abstract and asked if we could try to do this ourselves. He also picked up on the line equating eyes as cherries and encouraged us to fruit-ify something too.
Lastly, we workshopped each other’s selected writing, which included a fussy murderer, a carnivorous cave, and a first person account of how hard it is to stop scrolling on your phone and start writing... To the latter at least we could all relate.
Crow's Nest will return after summer!
Submissions Callout for Crow’s Nest members – ‘Liminal Gum’
Deadline: July 31st
Themes: Liminal / Memory / Liminality / Betweenness / Limbo
You are invited to submit writing that engages with the above themes in anyway. We want to collate and anthologise pieces that showcase your writerly ideas and engagement with the theme we’ve studied this Summer term.
The submitted pieces will be collated and first published as an e-zine, to then be collected in a physical anthology early 2023.
You can submit the following:
Up to 1000 words of prose – fiction, nonfiction, essays, vignettes
1-3 pages of script – stageplay, screenplay, radio
1-3 poems
Archive
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Junior & Young Writers – Week 6 (Writers’ Inspiration) – The Language of Fruit and Veg
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Junior Writers – Week 8 (The Art of Writing) – Sequel Stories
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