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What has the internet done to us as readers and as writers?
For five days in early June, Bianca Rocca (Fine Arts Honours student) and Toyah Webb (English Honours student) offered an opportunity to explore this question experientially by participating in an open and collaborative google doc. Their project, working title, was...
Taking a picture for a walk
For someone who has never written about art outside the world of ancient Roman statues, to be asked to sit and write about an abstract painting at a relatively early hour in a late-semester week is to be asked quite a lot. But sitting in the Gus Fisher Gallery, in the company of art from the University of Auckland’s collection, was enough to stir my sluggish student brain into some kind of creative action.
Mixing creative criticality and critical creativity in writing
How might we navigate, be affected by, and transform our immersive world of signs?
How do we construe and read literary and non-literary texts for different purposes?
The seeds of writing
CLeaR’s year of “Writing, writing everywhere” started last December with some early-summer sowing of creative impetus. Our first Creative / Critical / Collaborative writing retreat, which involved a small but diverse group of academics, one professional staff member and one student, transplanted us from the familiar campus setting (noise, email, busy, students, deadlines, can’t!) to a yoga centre in a lush wilderness away from Auckland, filled with native plants and birdsong.
LaTeX for Undergraduates Seminar
Despite being held during a busy time of year, just a few days before mid-semester break, several dozen students devoted an hour to learning about LaTeX, a typesetting program that helps users seamlessly integrate text, equations, graphs and figures. Utsav Patel, a physics undergraduate representing the Physics Association of the University of Auckland, facilitated the workshop, which was sponsored by CLeaR and its “Writing, writing everywhere” initiative.
Empathy, patients and poetry
Medicine Reflections: 102 poetic and artistic collected works of medical students at The University of Auckland, funded by a SEED grant, edited by Tanisha Jowsey, and published in March this year, offers a kaleidoscopic insight into the lives of medical students. I’m an arts student who knows little about these lives, except through friends and friends of friends. The medical world seems distant from the world of an arts student. For a book to bridge the two – to give poetry weight in a world seen most often under the light of science – is exciting.