Unfortunately the only 2 writers fest events I made it to this year are also the only two put on vimeo, but then, maybe that is lucky because they were both great events.
Here’s Jenkins’ talk.
He pointed out the peculiarity of “creative non-fiction” by defining by what it isn’t instead of what it is. He suggested we call it poetic documentary. The term already exists in film of the 1930s, such as in The Bicycle Thief.
Writers are not distinguished by the act of writing but by the fact of rewriting. He called a well-written sentence, a lozenge. The job of writing is to break up ideas, clichés.
The value of writing better isn’t remuneration but a kind of self-development and world-creation. To learn to talk to yourself better is to get a better life. To let others into the dialogue allows the dialogue’s benefits to spread. The outcome is deeper considered words.
A better poetry leads to compassion and away from practical short-term financial vision. Art leads to the left. He challenged anyone listening to take up the idea of making a poetic documentary of something of the other side of the street, and infuse it with a poetic narrative towards insight and compassion to spread the discussion broader. For example, write about a history or real estate, or the tar sands, or banking, or interview someone who had been imprisoned in the Kingston farm prison that was closed in favour of a system of cement block incarceration model. Farming the land is a sort of poetic antidote, a rehabilitative model to a troubled mind, to do things and make things grow in a self-sustaining farm, whereas the indoor prison block is more a punitive model.
Poetry can be a record for the next time history repeats so that we can confirm a pattern we see developing by looking back or suggest a way forward. The subjective aspect of poetry is in its favour. Journalism pretends there is no observer effect, but it nor poetry needs to. An audience member, Aiden Parchelo, pointed out “we’re hard-wired to be receptive to other human beings”. Telling stories about people taps into this. As a writer, we are creating views of the world, either replicating or altering for the better or worse. We can’t help but skew. Parchelo also pointed out “Journalists create observers.”
There’s not just a reporting of feelings but a ripple effect of those impacts, perhaps with a gap long after you remember the experience you recorded in a poem.
If you missed Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, you can watch him for an hour as he talked in Chicago in January. He talks about making mnemonic devices and the impact of digital devices on deep reads. Memorizing is learning. All the knowledge we have is that we can remember. A mind furnished with memory skills is stronger, can synthesize and create but the skim read and refer to recorded memory cannot innovate ideas, only mediate experiences.
He also talks about his journey into accidental participatory journalism instead of the usual pretend neutral perspectiveless journalism.