What goes on in the Creative Writing Club?

By Ahana Banerji, Year 13

Artwork by Ariana Estrada, 2018

This term, members of the creative writing club, “Ink”, have been working on honing their poetry and prose skills. Open to Years 7 through 9, the club has hosted a series of vibrant and interesting discussions and workshops from free-writing exercises to a debate on story structure in plays and films.

In an early session, we hosted a seminar-style lecture on “The Power and Meaning of Poetry” and explored how poetry is impacted in performance, citing a scene from the film Dead Poets Society as a stimulus. Following this, students became increasingly interested in the constraints and liberties associated with the poetic form. This led to Year 7 becoming sonneteers for a week, as we dissected the components of the infamously challenging yet timeless Shakespearean sonnet. We looked at two sonnets, “America” by Claude McKay and “Sonnet 130” by Shakespeare, to understand the conventions of the sonnet form, such as iambic pentameter and the rhyme scheme. Afterwards, students embarked on writing their own sonnets. The next week, we workshopped a few poems, and Athina V in Year 7 crafted her take on a sonnet, titled “Music”.

It has been an encouraging start to the year, and we have a lot more exciting workshops and lectures planned for the coming terms.