Our blogs

Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

12 July 2022

a pecha kucha & Zuihitsu

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

PreviousNext

Archive

Back to blog

What's on

Find out more

Our projects

Find out more

Our films

Watch now

Headlight Press

Find out more

Latest news

19 December 2024

Paid Opportunity for Writers: West Waterlooville

ArtfulScribe, in partnership with Studio Response and Winchester City Council, are appointing three experienced writers, who enjoy working collaboratively, to...

Read more

Our blogs

Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

Find out more

Resources


Why not get in touch?