Words, words, words: A Student Reading

Source: School of Foreign Languages
Written by: Nazlı İnal
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

On June 16, 2016, the final Book Club event of the semester took place in Room 101 of The School of Foreign Languages Building on the South Campus of Sun Yat-sen University. Supported by the Center for English language Creative Writing, the third year English majors put together a reading that was titled after a line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Words, words, words” (Hamlet, II.ii.192) was the first reading of a series that celebrates unpublished student writing. Five students, Gao Dazheng, Zhang Lihuan, Zhao Xinghui, Zhang Yilu, and Ren Yulong, who volunteered read the essays they have written in either the Fall or Spring semester of the academic year 2015-2016. About three dozen students and professors attended the event, most but not all of whom belonged to the English department. After the reading, the audience members commended the emotional nature of the pieces they have heard, and many confessed that they had not expected to hear such well-written pieces. 

The quality of published work is rarely criticized, while unpublished work is regularly dismissed as not good, or at least not good enough until it is published. It’s an assumption the majority of readers make, without realizing that all the great works of literature, seminal essays of linguistics or literary theory were too once unpublished text. Other than giving the students of English Language Creative Writing a voice, “Words, words, words” aimed to challenge two very common ideas. The first was to show that a text written in Times New Roman, twelve font, printed doubled spaced on A4 paper, could be just as successful or literary or moving as some of the published work one does not hesitate to praise. The second was to show that work in progress could, and should be celebrated, so should work that is unpublished, work that might in the end stay unpublished. In other words, all artistic effort deserves to be shared and recognized, because it is human nature to seek, make, and engage with art, no matter how professional.

And yet, the pieces read on Thursday afternoon were very professional even though most of them were first drafts. At the end of their third year, the English majors have taken four semesters of Creative Writing classes, in which they learn not how to be a writer, but rather, how to use the tools of the trade, which they then use according to their own interests and talent. Storytelling and composition of poetry have been important in many civilizations across the globe for thousands of years. Especially in nonfiction writing classes many students combine their inherent and cultural knowledge of narrative with the lessons on craft they are taking, and write pieces that readily achieve emotional, literary, and artistic value. In the past years many of these initially unpublished student work have been collected and published in anthologies, sometimes in collaboration with other universities overseas, and thus making the Sun Yat-sen University students internationally published authors even before they finished their undergraduate degrees.

The Center for English Language Creative writing has sponsored and hosted many literary events during the 2015-2016 academic year, including but not limited to, lectures by the new instructors, panels and readings by the writers who came to take part in the Sun Yat-sen University International Writers’ Residency and WrICE, as well as the writers who were invited separately such as Claire Wright and Robin Hemley.