Writing in Creative Practice: Exploring Layers of Meaning

It is my pleasure to announce the next of the Writing in Creative Practice Workshops. This time we want to specifically explore layers of meaning and will be hosted by the University of Chester on 26th March 2013. The official HEA annoucement and booking form can be found here.

Just before Christmas, Elizabeth (our host) and I got together to think about some of the visualisations and structures that can be used to show layers – and we tried some of them out.

We took sentence diagramming as a starting point. I had recently looked through When will the book be done?, a catalogue of the books published by Granary Books up to 2001, and had particularly liked What the Ambulance Driver Said by Jane Wodening (1998) , which uses a diagrammed sentence.  After doing some research we decided to give it a go and to diagram the Sennett quote used in the workshop proposal:

Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding. (Sennett, 2008:7)

While the inspirations had looked a bit like the roofs of houses, our version reminded me more of a mountain range, so I then used the subclauses to make up a sort of tunnel book.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth explored both tunnel books as well as layering with transparent paper.

Overall it was a great day (far too short, of course), which has given us some good ideas, I think, of what to explore during the workshop itself.