Creative Non Fiction

On the weekend, I attended a workshop given by Rae Roadley. She is the author of "Love at the end of the road", which refers to a house down at Batley on the Kaipara Harbour (you can see it from Otamatea marae). It was part of the NorthWrite Conference/workshop series run in part by the New Zealand Society of Authors
NorthWrite Website

Before I went, I had no idea what 'creative non fiction' was, and even since I am not totally sure... I can say that it is a merging of fact and fiction, where facts become friendly to the reader.

Now, since having written a PhD thesis, I found this thought slightly bemusing - facts cant become friendly, they are simply facts. You put them all together, use them as evidence, back up your arguments - there is nothing creative as such about that!

But we did an exercise, where the instructions were to imagine a place/building/outdoor space that is important or special to you. Describe the physical aspects, history, why I like/dislike it and so on. Then put yourself in that space, and write 1 - 2 paragraphs about emotions it evokes, how you feel about it and why, plus some facts (eg age, colour, etc). I found this exercise fascinating - first, because it was not after seriously researching some aspect of flower colour. Second, because the facts simply 'fit' in after some emotional creations!

Here is my short paragraph:

As I walked up the edge of the small, rocky beach onto the narrow neck that connects Bicayahuken to the mainland, the late afternoon angle of the sun hit me right in the face. A glacier, shining blue-white was edging down into the bay. The bay itself looked like something from the east coast of New Zealand. I felt like an early explorer, on my own heroic adventure despite being part of a student group. Biscayahuken is a small point of land in the north of Spitsbergen. It is named after the Biscay Whalers that were present in Svalbard during the 17th and 18th Centuries and has experienced human inhabitation. There were few remnants of human occupation these days. The rocky outline of a small hut with permafrost-churned grave sites nearby. Maybe they died from illness, perhaps old age. Noone in the group knew, and that seemed a poor legacy to have left behind. Rusted nails, broken glass and odd pieces of wire and such were strewn about, in between the small clumps of Saxifraga caespitosa. I could see that nature was simply going on, as it had done even when the occupants of the graves had been standing where I was.

Hut remnants at Biscayahuken, 2010

Thats as far as I got in the last half hour of the workshop. Interesting process, and definitely something I shall pursue! Rae Roadley was very adamant that one should be a kind narrator.

The view of the glacier

Some things are best left unsaid, and one persons recollection of a 'fact' may well be very different from anothers! The one saying of note that struck me was this, in the words of Micheal King (perhaps similar to W.B. Yeats?):
                                                 "Tread softly for you tread on my life"

Saxifraga cespitosa