Changing Perceptions
My perception as a writer has been altered, in a state of changing and has encouraged me in the use different qualities that I wasn’t fully aware of before the course. Thank you. I have read many creative non-fictions works prior and in the course but have realized that there is a place for this kind of writing that communicates on different levels, that maybe I could achieve with better contrast reflecting that in further works of my own in the future.
Writing automatically in that sense on location in the space to get a sense of real-time events and their subtle qualities, some better virtue how they fit perfectly in non-fiction styles of writing that I wasn’t quite aware that I could be using before could be accessible. How it could aid the actual position to help influence in things like political treatise, societal issues in the contemporary world ways like in public writing, but as true accounts, not always with agenda that some public spheres writings might be. It is like an intermeshing of genres so to speak, and lengthy research methods. I don’t personally regard labeling and genre sets as I follow a more Taoist understanding in the non-labelling, although it provides useful tools especially in academic discourse and the criteria’s involved it can be problematic. How rules can be limiting scope at the same time provide frames that aid the writer in compressing and containing context better it all becomes blurred, but aesthetically washed.
Sometimes it all seems contradictory and there will be slippage, and an argument could arrive. That not one particular answer is correct, especially intimately knowledge’s by anyone or anything addressed in creative non- fictions that can be only be understood by the personal life experience of the readers themselves.
How it could be useful in telling true stories of this kind- like interviewing recording and re-telling, setting agendas with works that might finally filter to the public and address issues that are common but might never get a platform to assist newer perceptions and personal/public awareness alike reframing it. To experience life through the lens of others life- experiences, to think about creative non- fiction for travel purposes, to engage qualities that might also help with seeing life in other destinations, senses of travel through spaces and different places not know yet know but beyond. Those frontiers are fathomable perhaps not only philosophically but tangible. These are all open to me now inform different points of view. How your own life experience can be sharing a personal journey or accounts and share that nuance, it’s really incredible. It is all a learning process and all about works in progress. To be conscious of what is the truth and what are the fabrications to make that happen morally and ethically with-in the boundaries imposed by the potential publication of it. Really it’s all a bit insane if we were honest. It starts with the education process as we learn to write and tell stories as exercises. In what exactly…
When I first began to write and I still have that exercise book, I wrote a fictional story ‘A day in the land of some place better…’ although it was a creative writing exercise and I was only eight my view to the world of writing was about fantasy but often my sense for writing was born out wanting change things, and include my true understanding of my world and how we operate in it collectively. At that time as a child, I was also influenced by my surroundings living in rural Australia on a dairy farm that then became a beef one, that then became a banana one all at once combining. All of those just to survive. It was a dominant influence on my early life- how that landscape that intermeshed subtle qualities of being a child alone in a harsh but beautiful environment natural landscape, as well as life, was like living on a farm at that time. The seventies was my reading of the world. I was also influenced by watching television that would occur daily watching ‘Sesame Street’, ‘Homicide’ a Crawford production, ‘Dr Who’ na na na na a crazy mix as I recall it now. In reading books that were maybe not for children as I found my parents novels at their bedside tables and I do not recall what it was about I read I what I could, and children’s stories like ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ by Dr Sues and ‘Are you my mother’ by P D Eastmen- the list is long and varied, and the encyclopedia Britannica was on the shelf- you see we were all avid readers in certain senses in our reading worlds, and our reading of the world, in particular, my mother who was speed-reader and read everything. Who I might add with a touch of pride went on to be the School Administrator of Politics and International Relations, at the University of New South Wales.
There was a background influence of music too, that adjusts my frequency, and that would often influence my moods vividly, still does as I love anything from punk to classical- these were played on the old turntable and reel to reel, and when my father couldn’t manage farm life and making enough money he returned to the city of Sydney to work in his other profession as a car wholesaler, and would visit us every six weeks. He would arrive with delectable treats, he would sometimes arrive with friends, and most of all the latest singles that were hits at the time, Our music along with his old music from when he was influenced by being a gunner in the Navy, around the wars time largely thrust me inside times in could never have known but felt connected to for their insistent melodies. Since living in the bush it was common to listen to country music too mums loved Dolly Parton, well we lived not far from ‘The Pub with No Beer’ and the writer of that song would hang out with my parents friends at the pub, and Slim Dusty although carries into the world wide most of the fame for it, he didn’t write it. I realized that some people write lyrics, and not sing them. So as much as this might be a diversion from my life story banging on here, I have come to realize what a wonderful thing it can be useful to write about your own life journey in a factual sense to on-share your own life-influences. It was around that time that death was a prominent factor as life is on farms, so I see why I would be always inquiring at least in my mind about it. I remembered there was an old dilapidated house that some of us would hang out in and have sleepovers, the local children would commune in gossip there and sometimes we did forbidden things, and we would get all crazy and tell stories about a person who was buried there underneath it, that began some interest for me like in Ghost Stories. Well, of course, we are talking fiction here, or are we? In different cultures and societies, these are part of the living world, like voodoo. Yet we all met in the congregation at uniting church occasionally, it was a lot like the redneck movies I got to see later in life really. Sometimes just to play with friends I had to help with plucking chickens after they were beheaded and dunked in hot water. In a sense, I see now how engaging it can be to be re-telling about things of the past re-inventing them through others experiences, or ways of seeing them. I even had a pet snake these are true stories how my world evolved. Our own personal experiences as writers as we might try then to become authors in the publishing sense- then the paradigms shift (for money making the purpose, ethical and moral issues are critical…)
Even if it might be ‘imagined ghosts’ they were born out of real events, how might we know better ways to explain them and be fully informed without any further investigation than philosophical reflection. So from this point of view taking notes and referring to them as real life events, filling the gaps refining them with some splashes of embellishment, for creative purposes it might have made me realize how valuable this kind of written art form Creative Non- fictions can be.
It’s not just about journalism, as a tabloid for shock, it’s deeper and closer personally to the sources being addressed, it is also one’s journey into framing it better and re-telling factual events with deeper meanings, not in a hurtful way. How really important it is to retain history and remind us of our past how it has affected us as humans in the every day, as everything we write effectively is becoming history as we write them as time is erasing- that quality of atmospheres of nostalgia and reflection might ensue. That’s very exciting as that in living moments can be saved, momentary episodes remind us of events, place and locations and a kind of mapping to express a true story events perhaps as it is happening for the reader but has happened in the story in the past and these can be engaging and may make us think with different perception as readers after. On so many levels…Some of the stories have been triggers of traumas we all face as humans, for example, the reading of ‘This house of Faith’ by Helen Garner that follows an author’s true account of a murder trial and its ramifications, and for me at least set me on some reflection of my own life traumas. How could I retell them in a different way like my poem for example ‘Memoir of Cattle, Dogs and Dingoes’? These follow the agitation in life as transports us into our faces of death and the dying episodes reposting. It hasn’t been long since my fathers’ death and it seems all the writing subjects so far have had a varied nuance of mortality and how we as humans deal with them. So at times this has been too close to the bone for me, and at the end of the semester the accumulation of concentrated writing has been a bit shattering, readings have led to some kind of breakdown emotionally. Writing can evoke powerfully profound effects as tools to creatively extract these ‘senses of loss’ and inform others about things we have in common. Pathos, ethos, and logos may have been seen too. We all face losses in the world, yet in loss, it is where we are also found. Unfortunately, there have been too many deaths to mention here in my life that might be available later to work with while in recovery, in states of crisis can be triggered and recovered by the act of writing itself.
Language can be a way to share these things, even it be in translation. As we had others students alongside who were not native speakers of English. Maybe they can be better writers because of knowing more languages than their own and better educated.
This Creative Non Fiction course has really opened my mind beautifully in that knowledge as a writer there are methods to develop my writing, better inform and it can be promoting complexities, and used in other ways to influence the world and reportage of this kind makes me very excited as I have new perspectives too in the unfolding. In other pathways of narrative getting closer to the subject expressing relationships created with the reader, and create ‘aha’ moments. How I could now apply myself as a better writer using all my life experiences encompassing, my real lived impressions and import ways of a novelist like a voyeur. It’s really valuable, and could be used to therefore inform true life, with subtle accurate experiences of others that we might never have imagined, much too in ways to extrapolate real life events so that public awareness of these that can be can be understood like in tragedy, crisis in worlds event like war, crimes and abuses of all kinds that humanity is facing. It can provide avenues for healing. It can also represent true-life anecdotes as memoir and about history and identification inclusive. And about travel through one’s journey recounting including the texture and flavors and landscapes we might now follow and have access to write about on the Internet in forums. These can provide a cosmic energy in flow communicatively.
In conclusion my intention with writing even it might be sad at times, I feel that emotions are useful source of persuasion albeit the moment’s of one’s pain felt, these feelings must be felt in senses outside language, in the feelings portrayed, fleetingly and then as readers we smile with learning something new, have empathy or added values in understandings about the world. Maybe beneath the umbrella of arts in perspective, observing them in ways we can then also pursue simple life experiences after with opened choices and adopt or discard them, or we can take more political standpoints, and have better knowledge’s how to apply them. These are opened out in the writing through discussions and debates, through inward thoughts that have made newer conduits to synapses in the brain, changing our brain washed minds and realigning pathways of discovery and further education in readership.
If that what this kind of writing does provide it can be creative knowledge through nonfiction form and that is extraordinary and can inform ordinary things. The works read or being written in the course, the student’s participation in sharing them, writing exercises and bringing them together in collaborate ways has been wonderful. Maybe too many to mention individually as my mind is already in overload exploding, but I am in debt silently, and am smiling inwardly and truly grateful. It might be that the academic platform revitalizes things that can’t be discussed on the outside we are really lucky participants. I am sincerely grateful for my life experience for that at this moment in time. Although in my lively disposition ‘in this moment’ might not have been informing in academic nodes of research, as they are not mentioned in the full sense of it -they are there I have them inside me. If I was to continue in the boundaries imposed I know it could be acknowledged. How many could we seriously be in debt to?
Right now as it is in the non-fiction world in which I live my own vulnerability is exposed and has creatively been expressed in some nuance of fictions albeit as I am created in a world that made me that way. An artificial one perhaps- I prefer to retreat and find meditation trusting that my mental health is of utmost importance for my well being right now. I must rest as all this sensitivity of triggers has sent me into a state of panic anxiety. It seems not always the best position to be in but as writers sometimes in their own world self-serving in a higher purpose of pursuit could be stuck in some kind of crazy void thinking of ‘what to write next’ frenetically avoiding we have a responsibility to balance it. As always a sense of humor might be useful. Hopefully, this will be some kind of creative reflection for me and reference aspects/concepts of what I found perceptively in the writing creative non- fiction course.
An Afterthought…
Reflections are not only those you see in the mirror.
Reflecting your face or image, but are a reflection of one’s identity or one’s mapping of existence encoded and etched along life’s highway.
What we see briefly in that space of time is made up of many things, many complexities, like a puzzle, some real some illusory.
Reflections can be reversed, which is how we see them anyway or inversed and de-selected- like in a computer. Reflections can be shimmers or rays of what we see, but also what we want to see.
Reflections are sometimes not what you want to see, but in truth, a portrait of constructed thoughts transferred to perceptions to allow us to make an understanding of them.
These can be reconstructed in forms of art and language as one tries to inform a portrait of themselves, or others, of events and locations, so in a sense, we can reflect, or at least be in a state of reflection…
http://www.creativenonfiction.org/online-reading/what-creative-nonfiction
