Summer 2002 Workshops in Creative Writing

Dates: Monday June 24 - Friday July 26, 2002 (except for the Workshop on Film-Making)

Information: Please click on the links below to access the relevant information:

• Poetry

• Prose Fiction

• Drama

• Film-Making NB workshop dates: June 8 to June 15, 2002

CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY

Regular students, aspiring writers and others are invited to register for a summer workshop in Creative Writing: Poetry to be directed by Stewart Brown who is well known in the Caribbean as editor of a number of important anthologies of Creative Writing including Caribbean Poetry Now (1984), Voiceprint (1989), The Heinneman Book of Caribbean Poetry (1992) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (1999). He has lived and taught in Nigeria for several years and is an expert on African Poetry in English.

Stewart Brown is author of four volumes of poetry, including Zinder (1986), Lugard's Bridge (1989) and, most recently, Elsewhere (1999). Many of the poems in these collections are set in and based on his experience of Africa and the Caribbean.  He is currently Reader in African and Caribbean Literature in the Centre for West African Studies at the University of Birmingham. He has edited critical studies of the great West Indian poets Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Martin Carter.

The workshop will run for six hours per week from Monday 24^th June to Friday 26^th July 2002. Applicants should have some experience of writing poems and must submit with their application a portfolio consisting of 3-5 poems (totaling not more than 6 pages in all). In the course of the workshop there will be in-class exercises in writing various types of poems as well as assignments to be done at home. Participants will be expected to produce steadily, to read their poems aloud in class, to participate in discussions which readings will provoke, and to produce a dossier of poems. Members of the workshop will have the opportunity to participate in public readings of their creations during the month of July.

Class Schedule: Tuesday and Thursday 9 am - 12 noon

CREATIVE WRITING: PROSE FICTION

Regular students, aspiring writers, and others are invited to register for the Cave Hill summer workshop in Creative Writing. Fiction. This year's fiction workshop will be led by the Jamaican writer, Patricia Powell. She is the author of three novels, Me Dying Trial (1993), A Small Gathering of Bones (1994) and The Pagoda (1998), the Bruce Rossley Literary Award (1994), and the PEN New England Discovery Award (1991). Excerpts from Powell's novels have been widely anthologized and she has lectured and led creative writing workshops in literary venues both nationally and internationally.

The workshop will run for six hours per week from Monday June 24^th to Friday July 26^th. Applicants should submit a short piece of creative fiction (max. 10 pages) with their application. Applicants should also be aware that the workshop will make considerable demands on their time, and that they should only apply if they are able to make the necessary commitment in terms of attendance and participation. They will be expected to produce consistently, and to subject their work to a collective critique by the group. This will be done in a constructive and encouraging manner, and is a necessary part of the process of preparing your work for a wider readership, including a series of public readings, to which all participants will be invited to contribute.

Class Schedule: Monday and Wednesday 9 am - 12 noon

CREATIVE WRITING: DRAMA

Regular students, aspiring playwrights, and others are invited to register for the Cave Hill summer workshop in Creative Writing: Drama. A workshop in writing for the theatre is being offered for the first time in 2001. The workshop will be conducted by the internationally-recognized Guyanese scholar, poet and prize-winning playwright, Michael Gilkes. Dr. Gilkes has been a senior academic for many years, here at U.W.I. Cave Hill, at the University of Guyana and at the Sir Arthur Lewis community College in St. Lucia. He has several scholarly publications in the field of West Indian Literature, including the seminal study Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel (1975), and has also published poems in anthologies and periodicals. Michael Gilkes is renowned as one of the principal figures in Caribbean theatre and film and has himself written several plays, including Couvade; A Dream Play of Guyana (1974) and A Pleasant Career, a play about the life and fiction of Edgar Mittelholzer, which won the prestigious Guyana Prize for Drama in 1992.

Applicants should have some experience of play-writing and the theatre and must submit with their application a portfolio consisting o a brief play or sketch, or a scene or two from a longer work that they have written (not more than 20 pages in all). Members of the workshop will be expected to compse theatrical scenes or passages of dramatic dialogue for class discussion and for practical work in the theatre space. Members will produce dossiers of dramatic writing and will also participate in some kind of public dramatic reading(s) presentation(s).

Class Schedule: Monday and Wednesday 9 am - 12 noon

FILM-MAKING

Joining the well-established Cave Hill summer creative writing workshops for the first time is a practical intensive course in film-making: Make a Scene: an Introduction to Digital Motion Picture Production.  The workshop will be led by award-winning experimental filmmaker Yao Ramesar, who teaches film at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine.  Of Jamaican and Trinidadian heritage, Ramesar describes his distinctive aesthetic as "Carribeing", and is committed to the training of film-makers in the region.  His television series of short films on aspects of Trinidad culture constitutes an unparalleled archive of sensitively observed and beautifully shot visual narratives.

Topics include steel pan, the Hindu River Festival, the Orisha Festival, masquerade traditions, parang, cricket and aspects of different religions, and (Ramesar's most recent work) a visual accompaniment to poems by Derek Walcott.  The course will cover the following areas:

• The Digital Image;
• Digital Sound and Soundscaping;
• Techniques of Electronic Cinematography;
• Screen-writing and Storyboarding; Directing and Producing the Digital Film;
• Digital Post-Production;
• Exhibition and Distribution in the Digital Domain.

It will be a practical course involving location work with the aim of producing a short film.

Applicants should be aware that this is an intensive workshop which will require considerable commitment in terms of time, and should only apply if they are able to make this commitment. The workshop will run for seven full days, Saturday June 8 to Friday June 15, between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. daily. (We will decide how many hours to do on Sunday when we first meet as a group.)