Amra Pajalic

So yesterday also began with a baby drama. Went in to pick up my daughter from her cot in the morning and found her cot wet from vomit. Had an instant panic attack-she’s never vomited. I’m due at the school and have to run the workshops and have a meeting with a Arts Victoria Officer afterward. Get on the horn to my husband and he comes home from work. I end up spending the morning cleaning up after vomit-she vomited three more times and being a human pacifier because she needed extra liquids so she was breastfeeding more.

I went to school later and arrived during lunch. The workshop was great. These kids are part of the accelerated class and they’ve all decided on a story and were writing in class. Some of them were handwriting, others typing up their stories. I set a deadline for them to submit their stories.

I figured out I need to firmer to steer their creativity in the right channels. We’re focussing on getting stories based on realism. One of the students began writing a story and it was going to be a mafia boss story. I focussed in on a paragraph where she had an interesting description of the narrator’s brother and suggested she focus on the family dynamic. The story she had written so far would be the same, but the focus would be closer to reality. I also had a consultation with a Year 10 student during lunch and it was the same thing. She wanted to write a forbidden love story based on the American south, but I tried to get her to look closer to home for inspiration. Same story, but a more realistic setting.

This is something I’ve been struggling with. When critiquing other writer’s the focus is on respecting their writing style and story and critiquing the big picture so I haven’t wanted to interfere with the student’s creativity. I’ve realised now that they need to be steering in the right direction. A lot of them begin writing stories and don’t know what’s going to happen or why. I remember doing the same thing when I was their age, so I’m trying to talk through the why and have them underpin their stories with logic.

Had a great meeting with Arts Victoria. The school has been fabulous about supporting the project so we’ve been really on track. She told us about the 1000 Pencils project and Neil Grant the artist is now studying to be a teacher, while David Williams the teacher is looking to get into writing more. So even though the project is about student’s benefitting it ends up being a creative journey for the artist’s too. I know it has been for me. Til next week.