Creative Writing in Foreign Languages

I was invited to attend the meeting at the University of Portsmouth. There was debate about how to take the project forward. The competition has already won an award. I was very privileged to be one of the judges last year.
Portsmouth now wants to expand and open the competition to schools and colleges in the area. In the meeting after the meeting, Elizabeth Maldonado, the lady in charge of the project at Portsmouth, talked about how we would like to run a conference, at the beginning of the academic year after next and invite language people who are interested in this, but also well known creative writers from other countries.
I’m interested in this whole are of research myself. I‘d like to unpick the sort of creative process which goes on when one uses a foreign language for one’s writing.
We had quite an interesting debate anyway. We almost wanted to take the word “creative“out because it implies something too clever almost. My left-brained brain started then playing with the idea that all writing is creative.
There does seem to be a problem about convincing the students that this is meant for them. Those who do the workshops don’t necessarily enter the competition. We know how simple “creative” writing can be. It’s all about using what you know – and that may be a very small amount – in a really interesting way. Our students don’t necessarily see it that way. It was that lack of confidence I was trying to address when I first started doing this with children in their first or second year of language learning. So, we considered also inviting them to write blogs on a topic of their choice and some reflective writing as well.
The idea is to go national in two years’ time and international in three. I can’t wait for that time – even though in theory, I could take my teaching pension two years later.
It is Elizabeth’s project, but it is something very important to me and I hope she will keep me involved.