Write To Reconcile – A Creative Writing Project

Residential Workshop - Colombo

I consider my self fortunate to be a part of write to reconcile project. It is a creative writing project to evoke the talents of the young writers. In collaboration with National Peace Council and sponsored by Norwegian Embassy and United States Embassy a series of residential workshops and online workshops have been organized.

Here, I am going to scribble about the residential workshop held in Colombo from 7^th – 10^th February 2013.

 Seven of us -three lecturers from Jaffna University(JU): Dr.Mrs.Sivapalan, Arthie Denicious and Lavanya Paramanathan, three literature students from JU Sarmatha Santhirasekaram, Arivarasy Muthulingam and Vithuja Rajmohan and along with them I myself went from Jaffna. We reached Colombo at 4 am and were waiting near Lake house for a van to pick us up. A small car came and we were gazing at each other as it was not enough for us. To our relief we were then accommodated in a van. We reached ‘Help age’-the venue of our residential workshop at about 5 am. Altogether there were twenty five participants and all of us were assigned into rooms; four participants in each room. As my room mates were to arrive in the afternoon, I was all alone in the morning looking at the wall and counting the minutes. All the ghost stories and movies I read and watched came in my mind. When you are alone the stuff you do not want to think about will come into your mind first.

We were given t-shirts, a study pack, note book, pens, pencils and Rupees seven thousand. Three thousand for our bus fare, two thousand to buy books and two thousand an extra money. Amrita and Shiromi were very kind and guiding us all the way. One by one my room mates  Shalini, Nushelle and Ella arrived at the scene. The workshop started at 4.30pm. Shyam Selvadurai, a renowned Sri Lankan author who won the Lambda Literary award for his book `Funny Boy’ started the workshop with a warming up session. He is the author of “Cinnamon Gardens” and “Swimming in the Monsoon Sea”. Nayomi Munaweera, whose first novel “Island Of A Thousand Mirrors” is in the long list of the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012, helped Shyam in conducting the work shop. We were divided into groups and were given individual and group activities as well.

The warming up exercise: Shyam instructed us to write a funny and interesting incident recently happened in our life. So I started writing about my announcing in our primary sports meet with Benick Roshna. Both of us browsed the internet and took jokes to be narrated in between the events during the sports meet. To our disappointment no one laughed at  our jokes as they were busy watching the events of their children. We sadly announced that no one laughed at our jokes. To our surprise we heard a burst of laughter from the audience, considering our last sentence as a joke. I wrote this incident and exchanged it with Arthie acca. Shyam again instructed us to draw a picture for the narrated incident of our partner. Then the sheet was handed over to the other person. He/she will write something regarding the picture. We did it again and again till the sheet came to the hands of the owner. Everyone laughed to see that the pictures and the original incidents had no connection.

Shyam started off with clichés, metaphors and similes. We were given the beginnings of sentences and instructed to finish the rest using similes and metaphors. I filled the sentences like

“Touching her dying father’s hand was like seeing a falling star”

“The morning sun tastes like sweet embraces”

The following exercise is called magic senses exercise. As before we were given several beginnings like “My hands can……”, “My magic hands can…..”  We must write two sentences for five senses. Altogether there will be ten sentences. Here are some of my write up.

“My hands can feel the affectionate touch of my mother”

“My magic hands can feel the touch of God”

“My eyes can see the overwhelming joy in my brother”

Then we moved on to writing similes and metaphors for colours red and blue. After that we combined metaphors and similes for war and peace. We were instructed to write two sentences with metaphor/simile regarding peace and war.  Next he moved on to plot structure, describing inciting incident, rising actions, the climax, the epiphany, resolution, profluence and decision. Our next lesson is on point of views. Shyam beautifully described each point of view with examples first person pedestal, first person lyrical, third person light penetration, third person deep penetration and finally omniscient narrator. We were given exercises to be done for each point of views.

We were briefed out about character building , how the character should evolve and grow, should have a bass in human nature, should be unique, thought to be put into them and they think like real people. Each group was given photographs and a set of questions like name, his/her age and etc. Another exercise regarding character is that the groups were given a photograph which contains two characters. We must create a profile for them describing the characters. Further we did an individual exercise called ‘I have a secret’. Each of us wrote about the secret of a character.

Shyam taught us to write “Haiku”, a Japanese poetry form. In English haiku is traditionally written in three lines, five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line and five syllables in the third line. All of us tried writing haiku. My trials are as follows.

“Little brother, lovely ball

At the porch jumping down

Smiling granny hugs him tight.”

The next lesson was on line breaks. Enjambed line, end stopped line and self enclosed lines were discussed. We identified the line breaks in some poems. On the final day each of us wrote poems for peace in self enclosed lines and war in enjambed lines in free verse using the metaphors and similes in our exercises. I scribbled the following

Peace

An orange which quenches our thirst.

A canoe which sails softly.

A violin that embraces our hearts.

The white wails of an angel.

The face of an innocent child.

The soft drizzles that slowly kisses the flowers.

This is peace the eternal bliss.

War

An onion which causes tears in

the eyes of the people and

forced them to shudder at the

heavy sound of the army truck

which has a base drum inside

breaks the calmness and creates horror

like a ferocious line that grabs our throat

it is the grey giant war!

Last but not least we were instructed to write a poem in free verse, using the metaphors we used for the colour red. I wrote the following.

The sight of my house burning during riots, Red!!!

The pain of feeling my brother’s last touch, Red!!

The boiling hatred inside my heart to be burst out, Red!!!

The sorrowful cry of a helpless victim Red!

The nasty smell comes from the ferocious animal evidently its Red!!

The angelic face of a newly born child, ending the tyranny of Red.

In between the workshop, participants were taken to Sapumal foundation, where we witnessed a collection of paintings by Sri Lankan painters. Geoffrey Bawa’s  house is really an architectural wonder-not only the minute designs, the older furniture, the roofs, floor walls and paintings but also each and every aspect in that place proclaimed Geoffrey Bawa’s glorious fame.

Our next visit was to the place of `write to reconcile web developers`where we were described of our online workshops. The groups were divided into five chat rooms where we will be posting our creative pieces. After the Colombo workshop, each participant should post a creative piece, an editorial letter for others’ work and discuss it with our chat room members. After the residential workshop in Jaffna, we will post another creative piece and the same procedure will take place repeatedly. The participants should select one of their two creative pieces and those writings will be published in Write to reconcile anthology in September.

In the book shop I filled my bags with Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance Of Loss”, Nihal De Silva’s “The far spent day” and Nayomi’s  “An Island of a thousand mirrors”. On the third day we watched a traditional dance programme by Chitrasena troupe.

 Two short films were screened to us, a film about Ai Weiwei, a Chinese contemporary artist and a film called “Lemon Tree”.

On the final day the workshop ended at 1.00p.Each participant waved good bye to each other. Now, We are eagerly looking forward to participate in the Jaffna residential workshop with lots of thanks to Shyam, Nayomi, Amrita and Shiromi.

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