Proustifications on Paris

The first time I went to France (by way of winning a small prize) I was teeming with
anticipation and a sense of adventure. I had never been away from my native America
before and was filled with expectations. If I lived frugally, I surmised at the time, I would be

able to stay in Paris for more than three months. I prepared for, consequently, the luxury
of exploring Paris in an unhurried way that would allow the city and its occupants to reveal
themselves to me in a natural, unfolding way.


Paris unveiled itself to me gradually. I spent a lot of time camped out in cafés, watching
and meeting people. It was in observing passers-by that I particularly noticed other
Americans on ‘holiday abroad’ charging from place to place, trying desperately to make all
the appropriate stops at the necessary high spots of Paris, attempting to take everything in
and doing all this within a very short visit. In the throws of this often-frantic process, my
countrymen and women would frequently become quite annoyed with the Parisian French.
Annoyed because they (the French) did not speak English, annoyed because their ways of
doing things –their culture—was not the same as the American way. Surely they (the
French Parisians) understood that they (the Americans) had a lot to accomplish in a short
time and that they (the French and their culture) were only making the process that much
more difficult!


The reality of the experiences of many Americans abroad is subsequently reinvented when
they return home. Like art museum visitors who are more comfortable with the
reproductions found in the museum shop (they can buy them) than the art in the galleries,
the narratives of Americans’ trips abroad are typically reconstructed through photographs
stateside. They are, habitually, not assured that their journey was a success until they
assemble their holiday photographic slideshow, reconstructing the story of their journey
into a perceived reality. The defining moment, crucial to their reconstruction of reality, is
the moment when they are reassured that they visited, in this instance, the right Paris.
This is accomplished when family and friends agree that yes, they were at the right places
because those were the same places that they too visited or certainly would visit. At last,
after a long journey fraught with unexpected inconveniences, language barriers, unfamiliar
terrain and food, peppered with what many American tourists misconstrue as the French
penchant for rudeness, they can finally sleep restfully in their American beds. Paris was a
success.


Paris for me was different from that. Perhaps it was the luxury of the time available to me
to slow my pace down to fit the pace of Parisian life. Perhaps it was by finding the
timeframe in which to generate discovery and allow Paris to reveal itself to me. I recall
that at the end of my stay there, I did rush around to some of the tourist spots that I had
never bothered to visit (even the Louvre, I must admit!) and snap photos of myself posed
in front of miscellaneous monuments of French culture. I did this, ironically, in order to
have photos to show family and friends back home. Yes, they too might wonder if I had
ever been to Paris at all, if I had no photos of the places they had attended on their trips.
A few days before my departure from France my lover at the time, whom I had met in a
Parisian café, said, “You haven’t even been outside of Paris the whole time you’ve been
here! We must take the train to Versailles!” We departed the following morning, arriving at
Versailles in a light but steady rain. We walked the crunchy gravel grounds of Versailles
for a while, noted the long queues for the palace and made a dash back to the village of
Versailles and a small bistro/café. We sat for hours at a table talking, just under a window,
the rain beating its steady rhythm on the leaded panes. It was not exactly Madeleines
dipped in tea, but it very well might have been. We sipped slowly these last moments,
savouring them for memories. We both knew that the palace of Versailles would have to
wait for another time; the pain of imminent separation was far more monumental than any
French palace could be. I have been glad of that day since, and retell the story often.


When one approaches a journey slowly and with a sense of expectation at every turn, the
journey is never really completed. Fortunately, I was able to return to Paris many times
after that first visit. I believe today that it was the way I approached my first stay that
provided the longing to return, the opportunities to return.




Copyright Kip Jones 2007



Creative Writing for Academics with Kip Jones

Creative Writing For Academics with Kip Jones

Bournemouth University
Friday 19th and Saturday 20th February 2016

Summary: The Creative Writing workshop will be a unique event in that it will not be a typical 'writing retreat' (with trees to hug and lots of time to ruminate), but rather a very active experience with lots of exercises, suggestions and supportive feedback on participants’ work from Kip Jones and other participants.  The point is to encourage both students and academics who would like to include more creative writing in their outputs, particularly those whose writing includes reporting on narrative and other qualitative methods of research.  It also helps immensely in the move to publishing in the wider world of blogs and online outlets, moving work to media and film, auto-ethnography and even fiction.

 

Justification: The important point of Creative Writing for Academics is to help academics and students achieve the goal of achieving more of their work read by wider audiences; in other words, impact. By providing an intense two-day experience for participants to engage in developing writing skills, the playing field is levelled and opportunities for facilitated learning developed. By engaging in creative writing, it becomes possible for all to write more clearly, more simply, even more creatively, when writing not only for academic publications, but also for outlets previously unimagined.

Methods: The workshop will present opportunities to work with academic material and expand its means of production and dissemination to new and creative levels through interfaces with techniques from the arts and humanities, including blog and magazine writing, film treatments and scripts, and poetry and fictional exercises. These intellectual exchanges encourage joint exploration of how researchers can engage with principles and tools from the arts in order to expand and extend the possibilities of dissemination of research data. Concepts of creativity itself will evolve and be transformed by participants’ outlooks and willingness to engage with unfamiliar territory. These processes comprise a ‘facilitated learning’—in that knowledge will be gained as a secondary goal through a process of developing new relationships through small group problem-solving and self examination, grounded in personal past experience and knowledge.

 

 Kip Jones BA MSc PhD is Reader in Performative Social Science and Qualitative Research in the Faculties of Media & Communication and Health & Social Sciences at Bournemouth University. Jones has produced films, videos and audio productions and has written many articles for academic journals and authored Chapters in books on topics such as masculinity, ageing and rurality, and older LGBT citizens. His groundbreaking use of qualitative methods, including biography and auto-ethnography, and the use of tools from the arts in social science research and dissemination, are distinguished internationally.

Workshop Price: £120. for two days. £90. for students/BU staff

Academics and students at all levels welcome!

Register online at: 

http://creative-writing-workshop.eventbrite.co.uk