A WRITING WORKSHOP

Recently Waterford Youth Arts had a visit from young journalist Anna O’Neill and here is her account of a visit to a writing workshop for young people aged 13-19 years.

A Peculiar Obsession in WYA

Waterford Youth Arts has for over a dozen years run an annual creative writing series of classes for teenagers and they were very much associated with the late Jim Daly who ran the classes and brought in guest writers from Patrick Galvin to Pat Boran. The baton has now passed on to young writer Eimear Cheasty and she has brought together a great group of young people and visiting writers this year. Among the writers coming in to run workshops are Mark Roper, Billy Roche, Neville Thompson and Garrett Shanley. Both Poetry Ireland and the Sean Dunne Literary Festival support the course and the young people are busy at present preparing pieces that they will read as part of the festival in April. Another addition this year is that Eimear has started to use the web and if you visit the waterfordyoutharts.com website over the next few weeks you will see extracts from new work etc.

Recently we went to see how the workshops are getting on and we caught up with a quirky creative writing student, Martina Collender. She is a 19 year old, exuberant individual with lots to report on in the creative writing workshop. ‘I’ve been attending creative writing classes for 3 years in the WYA. I first heard about it in the film workshop I was going to and continued on that path, now I do both classes. I discovered that creative writing really helps with film class as you’ve to think fast and create stories and characters to put on film and make a movie’.

Mark Roper with young writers

We asked her what the group was like and could twenty teenagers ranging from 13 to 19 years get on? ‘ Some of the younger kids in the workshop are hilarious. The different personalities and age groups create such a funny mix of stories and poetry. I actually prefer the diversity as the experiences and maturity (immaturity) of everyone really works in class. It’s one of the only workshops where the boys and girls are equal with each other.’ She then continues to tell me a funny story about twin boys in the class who swapped a peculiar obsession. ‘Last term one of the twins was obsessed with monkeys, writing everything about monkeys, and acting like one. This term, the other twin has the obsession. It’s really funny how they swapped and now we’re all listening to this twin and his monkey stories.’

From doing this class she expressed how she would love to work in journalism and writing in the future. ‘It’s a good way to discover what you’re good at and what you’re interested in. I want to look into all aspects of writing in the future. It helps when our tutor, Eimear, is so supportive of us and she’s such a good teacher.’ When we asked Martina who her favourite author is, she said Jim Nolan. ‘He is my favorite scriptwriter and he’s also a local Waterford man.’ She also tells how poet Mark Roper was a guest to the Creative Writing class last Saturday, 13th. The participants to his workshop had a full poem to walk away with at the end of his two-hour session, which exhibits a major achievement for all who attended. ‘His workshops are so interesting. He was brilliant.’