On Monday night the first fruits of labour from the MA Creative Writing course, that took off this year at Rhodes University, were shown to the public. The inside section of Red Cafe in High Street was filled with an audience curious to see what the first batch of students from the course had to offer.
A class of eight formed the group that wrote the pieces comprising Tyhini, the published collection of fiction and poetry produced during the first half of the course.
On Monday night the first fruits of labour from the MA Creative Writing course, that took off this year at Rhodes University, were shown to the public. The inside section of Red Cafe in High Street was filled with an audience curious to see what the first batch of students from the course had to offer.
A class of eight formed the group that wrote the pieces comprising Tyhini, the published collection of fiction and poetry produced during the first half of the course.
Each student took their turn reading some of their work, which ranged from humorous accounts of the ethics behind stealing toilet paper to hard-hitting and poignant stories that only South Africans could tell.
Talking to Grocott’s Mail one student, Reneilwe Malatji, praised the course because of its structure that exposes writers to a wide variety of writing styles and techniques.
“We learned different things from different teachers who are active writers,” Malatji said. The course actually boasts more teachers than students, who have shared the experiences and challenges of their specialist genres with the class.
Robert Berold, the coursework co-ordinator, said the MA course was very process-orientated and intense, which he believed to be very stimulating for the students. In the first half of the year, a new teacher would come in every week to present a lesson and give the class an assignment. Throughout the rest of the week, the students would have to create something in the vein of that particular teacher, and then have a session with the class to criticise it before submitting their work.
Scriptwriting teacher, Paul Mason, has designed and co-ordinated writing workshops for the past 13 years, primarily in Cape Town, and said this way of teaching prepared students for the novel-length piece they were working on in the latter part of the year.
“It provided a very good grounding for making decisions regarding their extended work, and makes it different from many courses of its kind,” he said.
Berold announced that next year a number of changes would be made to the course, such as increasing the class size to 20 students and allowing a number of part-time and correspondence students to take the course. More teachers would be brought into the curriculum, he said, and a non-fiction section would be added to the course.
