Participated in a creative writing class at Aalto facilitated by Fer Boyd. The week was rough but rewarding and I learned a lot on how to host collective writing efforts. Boyd was great and it was relieving to experiment with writing in the Aalto academic context. The group was fun, smart and active! A lot of piercing one-liners and concepts were thrown in the air. “Holy, as in it has holes” was offered was a way to explain the positive effects porousness provides texts. We also discussed that the term and concept of “Native-Speaker” should be abolished. An alternative from Russian language was proposed “Language Carrier”. This would work great in Finnish too: Kantokieli (Äidinkieli < Kantokieli). This would be translated as “tree stump” -language.
There were also some revealing experiments with citations. We observed that in fiction, stories within stories deepen the reading experience. The relations of a reader following a fiction, from were the antagonists of a story hear a new story as a part of their quest, blurs distinctions and suck the reader in (I’m trying to describe the framing techniques of One Thousand and One Nights). In academic writing quotations work in an opposite direction. They push out from the text and present themselves as unnegotiable, hence shallowing the reading experience. I’m tempted to write the bulk of a text as a quote and to infuse my own thinking to it as a quoted fiction.
Wrote two texts I feel confident to tag as Art-Writing.