Tag archives for Writing - Page 7
A215 – Life Writing – Initiative at Night
Here's the second of the pieces I wrote for the A215 Creative Writing online tutorial on life writing. Saturday 13th December 1991 It’s 3am on a Saturday before Christmas 1991, I’ve only been awake for 21 hours. After a day of lectures I went with the UOTC to Redford Barracks in Edinburgh for a training camp. Since 1830 I have been on the Pentland Hills doing orienteering and solving problems with a team of third year cadets. We’ve not been good at following the approved DS solutions. To change the tire on a land rover without a jack we ignored the planks and mik crates and instead rolled the vehicle onto its side before righting it after we’d changed the tire. Our time was the fastest, but the officer wasn’t pleased. To take a casualty across a minefield (laid with…
250 Posts
Well 251 now as it happens, since this one is the 251st post on themself. I've always been a bit vague about blog dates, largely because it doesn't really matter all that much. I've been writing for decades, before it was even possible to publish it easily. There are still a couple of ring binders with stories in them and also dozens of notebooks and a couple of boxes of index cards from before the internet. I doubt many of those will ever be published, although they may well be mined for ideas eventually. This is not my first blog, and as much as I can I've imported the articles written for the previous blogs into wordpress. I've also gone back and gathered up things that I wrote for publication and added them into the archives where I can. There…
A215 – Life Writing – An Early Memory
We're on to life writing, which is a pretty wide field I've realised. I've temporarily paused trying to write TMA4 and prep for the EMA to participate in A215's 4th online tutorial. The task here is to write three short snapshots of memories and then try to link them together with a through-line. We've not to post the original pieces to the tutorial, but rather a consolidated draft. So I thought that this would give me three ready made blog articles, but on reflection I only want to post two of them. Here's the first. An Early Memory It’s sometime in the late 1970s, I’m about six or seven. Sitting on the multi-coloured living room carpet, it has a pattern of squares with swirly bits on the inside of them. Each of the squares has a border wide enough for…
Poetry – Bloom by James Kemp
Bloom “Splash!” A roar over my head closes from behind and drowns the radio. Binoculars brought to bear, I observe the seed embedding. It grows a small orange blossom. Morphing into a larger, darker flower climbing from the point of impact. Rain patters over the iron roof as sods and stones strike sonorously. The flower is gone, dissipated in a cloud of dust, and silence returns. Notes Bloom was the first full poem that I wrote, and this is the fourth draft, which may not be the final version. It was prompted from my memory of watching artillery shells burst when training as an artillery forward observer at Warcop training area in Cumbria in 1991. On the FOO course I gave an incorrect map reference and the first ranging shell burst about 150m in front of me (the wartime safety distance is…
Poetry Station
my desk for writing poetry I am busy crafting poetry for the third assignment of my Open University course A215 Creative Writing. Or rather I am indulging in a little displacement activity right now. However I will be back to work in a few moments. You will see from the picture of the table I'm using as my desk a number of things. Most useful being Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled which is a very good introduction to poetry that I heartily recommend. Next is the video camera that I've been using to record myself reading the poetry out loud so that I can listen back and refine it. This is my own take on poetry being about the sound of the thing, much more so than prose. I think that's what makes poetry harder for many people…