SUMMER WILL PERHAPS BE FOREVER associated with long days under the scorching sun and leisurely walks along the beach. Many consider it to be the ripe season to learn and explore new crafts--mostly those leaning to performing arts such as dancing, singing and acting. However, these five girls chose to venture to a slightly different path to honor the summer sun.
Creative Writing does not require lavish costumes, not even wide spacious halls—none of the fancy instruments that catches our attention. They say, enrolling in a writing class is boring and not necessarily a good way to enjoy the summer. This may very well be the opinion of most people as they observe a writing class. But one has to know that amidst the monotonous atmosphere, something is happening—perhaps something like a pelican whose wings are wondrously beginning to unfold or something sinister like an owl hooting under the moonlight. Indeed these things do happen, and can only be witnessed by the writing student from her mind’s eye.
This is possible because of the thing called imagination, the abandoned magical toy of our childhood. This is the primary ingredient of all creative work. Imagination jumpstarts a person to unleash a creative passion that is so impossible to ignore or hinder, almost like a growing itchiness. And so I find myself teaching Creative Writing. And so also these girls find themselves learning to harness the power of their imagination.
Learning how to write, one realizes that it entails a process, a careful purging of the imagination so that something beautiful on paper will come forth. It is in fact a laborious discipline that requires practice so that skills will be sharpened. It is hard to imagine that a writer must sweat catching elusive yet colorful butterflies from his imagination like a butterfly collector dying to complete his gallery of preserved species. Better yet, the writer is like Paikea—that enigmatic Maori whale rider.
While studying the craft of storytelling, the class had the opportunity to celebrate the story adapted by the film, The Whale Rider. The legend is that Paikea rode on the back of a whale and led his people to New Zealand. Since that time tradition decreed that the first-born male descendant would become chief of the tribe. Then Pai is born—and she is a girl. She grows up within a closely-knit village which retains the tribe’s traditional relationship with the sea and their warrior values. Although loved by all, Pai faces rejection from her grandfather who is brokenhearted that there is no grandson to carry on the line. But Pai is indeed blessed with the spiritual and leadership qualities of her ancestors and, in her own way, struggles in a male-dominated world to prove herself to her grandfather, the chief, and win his respect. Then the community is forced to come together in order to save a pod of whales that is stranded on its beach. Pai’s spiritual affinity with the whales and her courage finally proves that she is the true leader of her people.
The class remembers the film so well as it became for us a model, a pattern of a good story. We can still see Pai’s hand slowly caressing the unmoving bulk of a whale, the water that soon after spouts from its back announcing its approval to be led back to the depths of the ocean. We realize, how such an enormous task falls on Pai’s person and how it is the same case with the very craft of writing stories.
Words are unmovable as a whale on a shore. This is a hard truth I learned as a struggling writer. I am very sure these girls have started to discover this truth as they scribbled for the right words to come up with stories. But as with Pai, courage holds the key to move the unmovable.
The following stories are young voices, summoning the whales of the imaginative mind, written by young courageous girls. So perhaps, a good transition needs to be placed after a particular paragraph, or an awkward preposition needs to be replaced by an appropriate one. That does not matter now. Suffice to say we shall see that through their stories these girls are learning how to befriend the whales of their imagination.
Enrolling in a creative writing class had confined these girls to a silent, chilly room. Reading their stories, one cannot help but realize that they in fact, have gone to honor the summer season by swimming into the depths of their imagination and above all, by riding whales.
