At Kaitaia College our aim was initially to create a range of poetry 'posters' that captured the Far North. Apirana took the students (Year 9 and 10) through a range of exercises (many similar to the ones he used at the local primary schools) to encourage them to write and see the world in a different way. Unfortunately, the students did not have the opportunity to finish the poetry for the project and so this part is still incomplete. Of course, they have now gone on holiday and we have to wait until the beginning of Term 4 to do this. Once students give me their work, I will be emailing it to Apirana for feedback and then we will endeavour to complete the project as we initially intended. Doing something like this has its challenges in a secondary school. I had to work around the timetable and there were times when it was not possible to have all of the students out of class for a scheduled workshop. We had two students filming the workshops with the intention of putting together a short documentary once all work is complete. Overall, it was a positive experience for the students and teachers involved, although admitedly, very demanding on staff. Below is Rita Lennon's account of her experience. (Ellender Wilson)

DAY ONE

I walked into the library and sat down at a chair. Then we began. I had missed the sessions which had occurred earlier in the week due to illness, so I was a tad worried that I wouldn’t be able to catch up with whatever we were working on. Luckily for me, it seemed we were starting on a new venture that day.

Mr Taylor read us a legend about how Kaitaia got its name, which was completely different to the one I had always been told. When I said so, I was encouraged to tell my version. Well. Easier said than done. I didn’t know the names of any of the involved parties, and I could only guess at the general storyline, since I hadn’t heard the story told in a while and I hadn’t grown up with it or anything. So I stumbled my way through what I remembered and came up with the vaguest excuse for a Maori legend possible. At this point, I was thinking to myself that it would have been better for everyone involved if I had just kept my mouth shut.

We were instructed to write a poem, “about a page long”, about the legend (the former one that Mr Taylor had read). It was a little difficult – I’m not used to writing poetry for an actual subject. Usually I just write down a mixture of feelings and fiction, and I’m good to go. So at first I was a little stumped, and spent maybe five minutes trying to figure out how to write the legend in a poem without making it sound like I was just recounting the whole thing in little verses. Eventually, I got started, and I ended up writing a few four-lined verses that fit into the page, not one line more or less.

Amber and I finished at the same time, so, neighborly friends we are, we swapped poems and read, both lamenting in whispers that ours was stupid. Mr Taylor approached and glanced over them. He seemed pleased. Encouraged to go onto the second, vague legend, I wrote a shorter poem. No break in it, no particular rhythm, just about ten lines of quickly-scribbled poetry that I probably should have tried harder on but decided was good enough, if – once again – vague.

DAY TWO

There were several reasons why it was a good day – one was that we started with a shared lunch. Then we went right into our work – short stories. “Use humour,” Taylor said. Right, then.

What seemed like an age of mad scribbling and hand-cramp later, we started to share some of our stories. Some of them were thinly-veiled jabs at infamous educators, others were bizarre snail matchmaking stories. Either way, they were entertaining.

“In the end, the best way to learn about writing is to write.”

Whilst the scribbling had been taking place, Mr Taylor had written this up on the whiteboard. “No one can tell you how to write,” he added, “although it’s good to listen to advice.”
After this, we wrote another story – a challenge had been issued, after all, that we couldn’t possibly write two stories in the short space of time. We proved him wrong.
Apparently, most of his adult classes couldn’t have done that. Maybe there’s something to be said for younger authors – we don’t have life experience weighing us down and telling us what can’t happen, so we come up with the most random ideas anyone has ever heard of.

DAY THREE

Plays. It was all about plays today. Turns out Mr Taylor is an actor too – add that to the list of things he does. He told us the basics of plays, how many acts some of them have on average, how there are usually several scenes in one act. Then we got down to setting our scene.

I decided on my story and got right into it, even though we were only really supposed to be writing where our characters were and what they were doing there. A glance around showed that most other people were doing the same – we all finished around the same time, except for some people who came in late because they had an exam.
Three scenes later, we all read out our plays – they all had some kind of conflict in them, a lot of them about a love interest. Some of them had really out-there plotlines – aliens, unicorns, the like. But they sounded like they would be fun to act out, and Mr Taylor encouraged us to do so on another occasion.

We went out onto the field at one point and listened to, then looked at, what surrounded us, so that we could write a poem about that moment in time. I liked this – it was easy to write about something I saw almost every day. In the same way, it was kind of hard to illustrate it in a way that really captured it.

“Wasteland”
(Formerly “What I saw at Kaitaia College 14/9/10, 12.10pm)

Outside is a wasteland
Rubbish blows like tumbleweeds
In a desert of churned grass.
Isolation and desperation
Tinge the trees blander, the sky colder.
Slow circles are meandered.
Behind me, the school
I turn
Beside me, the school
I turn
And see creamy-coloured classrooms
Windows gazing unseeingly, accusingly,
Are you allowed out there?
Aren’t you meant to be in class?
I close my eyes and hear activity
I open my eyes and see a lie
Or is it truth?
I see nothing happening
I hear, every moment, the opposite.
Is something happening?
In some classroom, maybe
But here in this cold, churned space,
It is muted by sight
It is muddled – as am I.

At the end of our time, Mr Taylor told us once again that the best thing you could do was to write and use our “built in lie detector”. That way, we could develop our skills and become better as writers.