Surrealism, OULIPO and Writing Practice: Creative Residency at UCA

Yesterday, Creative Writing students at UCA spent the day with researcher and writer Sonia Friel, who is the creative resident this week at Farnham. She is running a variety of workshops throughout the week yesterday students were exposed to the work of the surrealists and how they use a variety of games to stimulate creativity and thought about process. A strong emphasis here is on the free play of association between disparate materials and ideas. This is such a useful idea because there is no expectation on the part of the writer that what they produce is ‘finished’ or polished; it is something that is made with little expectation and lots of curiosity. 

              

In the afternoon, Sonia gave a presentation about the OULIPO movement and their ideas about the connections between mathematics, literature and the idea of form. We were exposed to some works that place a high level of constraint on the writer, often with the use of generative patterns, such as in Queneau’s famous ‘One Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets’. The emphasis here is on creating ‘potential literature’; which can be born out rules, regulations and rhythms. The group then worked on a series of exercises that challenged them to be creative with boundaries by having boundaries to their creativity. We looked at the Haiku form and created ‘larded’ Haikus by combining different students’ work. 

                

Overall, I can’t emphasise enough what a great start to term this was. This week students were flung headlong into a variety of ways of thinking about, analysing and producing texts and I hope they’ve found it enjoyable, challenging and an example of how the course mixes the theoretical and the practical.

If you wish to find out more about what Sonia is doing around UCA, she has very usefully written a blog about it: http://ucaarchives.wordpress.com/

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 Dr Craig Jordan-Baker