Intercultural Collaborations - Josh Peterken

1. Creative Work from Interview https://titlepending19.blogspot.com/2018/09/project-milestone-2-creative-work-from.html This blog post was made as a result of my first out-of-class interview, with Jacinta. The interview I conducted went extremely well, and I felt that I had learned so much about somebody I had only met just before it had started. We spoke for about half an hour, mainly regarding her studies, work at RMIT Connect as well as at the Women's and Children's hospital carrying out hearing tests for newborns, and her experience as a single mother. There was so much that I gained from this interview, that unfortunately, it didn't all find a place in the fiction piece I crafted. What really stuck with me was how busy of a life Jacinta has. I was inspired by her ability to take satisfaction out of it and be happy, despite juggling study, two jobs and parenthood. I really wanted to get a firm understanding of what this lifestyle is like, so I created a charac...

Ah, Habitus, that great confusing word from Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice . At the beginning of the semester, I wrote that my habitus in relation to writing has mostly been of my experience growing up in a household of five boys (myself being the oldest) and of playing games outside with our imagination, and how that has fueled my desire to write fantasy novels. Two and a half months later, I now see that my writing habitus is so much more than that. Not only has it expanded tremendously over the course of Intercultural Collaborations, but I now see that it was always more than I thought. I believe that this class has helped me broaden both my habitus, as well as expand my view on my previously existing habitus. This semester has really been the perfect mix of classes for me, taking The Particular is the Universal , Short Story Writing and Exploring Asian Popular Culture. Through my short story class, as well as the previous classes in my major of creative wr...

For my final creative piece, I have decided to write about a young woman from the quiet town of Sigtuna, Sweden. Cecelia comes from a highly traditional family--her father has never set foot out of the town. But she has always dreamt of visiting more exciting places. She travels to Hong Kong, in spite of her father's wishes. The core of the story is about wanting to experience new things and how some people can grow bored with the mundane, while others desire it. The inspiration for this story came from the interview with my partner in Hong Kong, Natalie. One of the comments that stuck with me in our interview was that Hong Kong isn't a place that you would want to go on a holiday. In contrary to this, my father had recently gotten married in Hong Kong and spent part of his honeymoon there, and found it to be a highly rewarding and enjoyable experience. This got me thinking about how as people we can grow tired of the things we are surrounded by, whether it is a busy city or ...

I'm Josh Peterken, a twenty-one-year-old student, studying creative writing at RMIT. 2018 is the second year of my course, with my first year being completed in 2016. I took a year off from my studies in 2017 due to personal reasons. I particularly like to write fiction, especially popular fiction. While I have never had my work published, I am reaching the finishing stages of a fantasy novel which I will seek to publish in 2019. I have always loved popular fiction for its ability to send the reader to another world, and its ability to tell powerful stories in unexpected ways. Because of this, my two literary heroes are Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson. The most surprising fact about me is that I got married to my partner of four years in February of 2018. We are both students and live over an hour away from our universities, but are enjoying life just as it is, no matter what challenges come our way.

It's the first week of September 2017. Melbourne is alive with excitement. Melbourne's little brother, Adelaide, a ten hour drive away, buzzes with their own two-team rivalry. It's four weeks until the AFL Grand Final and the future is filled with possibilities. There are 36 possible combinations for that last week of glory, and everybody holds their breath. To the outsider, it seems barbaric. Most outside of Australia have never even heard of the Australian Football League, and those who do struggle to comprehend the size of it. Even many people in Australia don't understand it. How can one gain so much joy from a ball being kicked between two big sticks? Week one comes and goes in the blink of an eye. Just like that, two of the eight teams are eliminated. Essendon and Port Adelaide fans prepare for the long summer ahead. Many of them go through a grieving process, for a year that has been wasted. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. They console each o...

I have always thought of Hong Kong as part of China. I was somewhat surprised to hear that people in Hong Kong, however, do not consider themselves as such. Later, I also discovered that while this is true, many of them do consider themselves to be Chinese. This distinction between whether Hong Kong is part of China or not is so great that it has led to one of the most common examples of the Mandela Effect. For anyone unfamiliar, the Mandela Effect is a phenomenon of collective false memories, named for many people believing that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, even though he went on to become the President of South Africa a decade later and only died five years ago. It is common for people to believe beyond doubt that Hong Kong is a separate country, becoming independent in 1997 when in actual fact sovereignty was handed over from the United Kingdom back to China. In light of the fact that the people who live there do not consider themselves as part of China, I suppose thi...

“It’s nice to spend time together like this.” Her words rolled toward me, but I barely registered them. The sand in Barcelona was so warm, so soft. Growing up, we never got to see the ocean. How many times had Tess and I been to a beach together? I could probably count it on one hand. “Jacquie, are you even listening to me?” “Mhmm,” I said, the slight sound coming right back to my ears in the ocean wind. “You’re not, are you?” “Sorry,” I said, “just thinking.” “About?” “Doesn’t matter.” She wouldn’t understand. Tess wasn’t one for the introspective.   After three days enjoying the beach warmth, the feeling of business was finally beginning to fade. Even on the plane over, a paranoia hung over me that I should be doing something. Household jobs, dropping Sarah off at soccer practice, taking a shift that I knew I couldn’t handle. God, when was the last time I’d watched a movie just because I wanted to? “I should call mum, check up on Sarah.” “Jacquie,” Tess sai...

I had a lot of fun with the renga exercises we did in class recently. It was a nice change to not worry so much about the direction of a piece and just write something without any pressure. I'm sure a few other people enjoyed that too, because somehow the character of my story became a bird. I don't know if it gets much worse in terms of thematic changes. The story was initially about one of feeling at home in a new place, even if you aren't familiar with it, similar to my own experience moving from Adelaide to Melbourne. By the end of the story, I struggle to find a coherent theme without salvaging. Possibly it could be read with a theme of overcoming adversity, with the bird succeeding in taking the metal can. Or a story about seeing things from a new perspective? I'm not entirely sure. I wonder how the bird character came to be. Was it just a bird metaphor gone wrong, or the piece up until then just severely misread? Did somebody just decide to completely change the ...

Prompt: What can and can’t you ask somebody that you are interviewing? When we try to get an understanding of somebody’s habitus, is there anything that is off-limits? How do we find those boundaries? “How many people have you fucked?” “Excuse me?” I ask them. My eyes bulge out, but they look at me with so much confidence. Like they’ve asked this question a million times before. “How many sexual partners have you had in the past?” They ask me again but reframing the question. I stutter in space for a few seconds. “D-does it matter?’ “Well no,” They say with a sly smile, “I’m just curious is all. Curious about you.” I don’t want to answer, but I feel being quiet would be somehow rude, despite the question. “What do you think?” “I dunno, you seem like the kind of ‘sex after marriage’ bullshit preacher sorta person,” “The fuck?” That audacity. Something began to brew in me, I push it down further. “So, am I right?” “I don’t think you need to know, how is it relevant?”
They gi...

Prompt: How long do you need to spend in a place to understand it? When does a place become “home”? Sometimes you know where your home is, even if you’ve only been there once. That was what it was like for me. My family lived in Perth for the majority of my childhood. Sixteen years in a city I never felt like I understood, even though I grew up there. Sure, the sights were familiar. I knew where everything was. It was a comfortable childhood of familiarity. But it never felt like home. Just now, we’ve crossed the border between Victoria and New South Wales. Mum and dad have done it many times before. Not me. This is the first time I have been in New South Wales. The road trip to our new state has taken almost a week. We are tired and frustrated with one another. 
Something changed within me as we crossed the border, looking at the sign which reads “Welcome to New South Wales”. Somehow, I knew this was home. It would always be home to me. The state where my mother grew up, where my c...

This piece is the product of an interview with Saaro. Due to the fact that the task included being a reluctant interviewee, I didn't gather heaps of information but did manage to get a few gems which have inspired this piece. My tactic throughout the interview was to be as specific as I could with the questions and to have many different questions prepared. One of the most fascinating facts I learned was that the first poetry Saaro wrote was about an imaginary cat in primary school, which inspired this piece. I wanted to explore childhood moments which influence a desire for creative writing, as well as the self-doubt that can creep up when sharing one's own work. The piece has been written with an intention to blend the themes and styles of Saaro's writing and my own, particularly through the use of both prose and poetry. My Cat When Mrs Konheim told all the second-graders that they would be writing poetry, Ena imagined running to the library and picking out a bo...

I imagine that there would be numerous advantages to the creative process gained through the knowledge of multiple languages. While I personally don't speak multiple languages (although I can still count to 100 in German and could tell you what some  of the Japanese hiragana characters are), as somebody who enjoys writing in the fantasy genre it would be remiss of me not to mention the fact that Tolkien, the man responsible for the immense popularity of the genre today, spoke many different languages, learned both throughout his childhood and later education. He then went on to invent his own Elvish language, which can be learned today. But I believe that one of the biggest advantages of studying language, in terms of creative writing, comes less from the actual language itself, and more from the cultural studies that come with it. You can't learn a language without also studying the culture behind it. To speak another language fluently one needs to have spent time in the co...

Who can write whom? Who can't write whom? When you write about a different culture or your own, are there certain things you should write about or shouldn't write about? There's been a lot said about cultural appropriation over the last half decade or so. I understand it, to an extent. But I think sometimes we go too far with it. If an object, food, story, etc. has significant cultural meaning, it needs to be respected. A few months ago, a teenager sparked controversy when she wore a traditional Chinese dress to prom in the United States. There was nothing malicious about her wearing the dress. The girl wore the dress out of love for its history and to show respect to cultures different from her own. The reaction was way over the top. It's okay for people to think it was in bad taste. But this teenager was cyber-bullied and threatened. Isn't the world a better place when we are all sharing ideas and parts of our cultures? As long as the "appropriation...

Once, during a game of Dungeons and Dragons , I was stupid enough to attack a raven which had been giving us odd looks as my companions and I travelled through the land of Barovia. As it turned out, the bird had been a were-raven, and a member of a secret society which wanted to aid us in our quest to defeat the vampire lord, Strahd von Zarovich. I had misread the signs, paranoid and possibly a bit xenophobic. What the raven had meant to be a friendly greeting, I had taken as hostility. As a consequence, we found ourselves pushed out of the local inn, shunned by NPCs who had been allies, for they had also been were-ravens. Dismayed and ashamed of my actions as the session drew to a close, I scoured the internet for a story I could use to mend the damaged relationship. Eventually I found it:  mokusatsu. A Japanese word which literally means to kill with silence. It is also a word which was horrendously mistranslated by the American government in 1945, leading to one of the greates...

This is a writing prompt that I have struggled with for the better part of a week. What is habitus? It doesn't help that Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice  is deliberately written to be difficult to understand. But after contending with this question, I think I am starting to get the idea. Our habitus is always changing. Every moment that we experience defines us, either consciously or subconsciously. Our habitus is the amalgamation of those moments. It is largely shaped by the culture and customs that surround us. In a way, we all have an impact on each other's habitus. What happens around us changes the way that we see the world, for better or worse. My own habitus as a writer is somewhat difficult to contend with. Having spent the vast majority of my writing life (the five years in which I have had a strong enough passion for writing to seek a career out of it) writing long form fantasy, I don't feel as if I have reflected my own habitus in my writi...

"There’s a profound difference between making something up and imagining it. You’re making something up when you think out a scene, when you’re being logical about it. You think, “I need this to happen so some other thing can happen.” There’s an aspect of controlling the material that I don’t think is artful. I think it leads to contrived work, frankly, no matter how beautifully written it might be. You can hear the false note in this kind of writing. This was my main problem when I was just starting out: I was trying to  say something . When I began to write, I was deeply self-conscious. I was writing stories hoping they would say something thematic, or address something that I was wrestling with philosophically. I’ve learned, for me at least, it’s a dead road. It’s writing from the outside in instead of the inside out." - Andre Dubus III

The first sentence in Getting Here is around three lines long and has no commas. In fact, the story almost entirely ignores the use of commas and opts for run-on sentences instead. Some readers may have to read a few sentences several times to understand their meaning. This can be jarring at first, but over time, they begin to reflect the narrator’s personality. The run-on sentences fit well into the idea of the narrator questioning and reflecting on his past. We read his thoughts – raw and unfiltered. Through this stylistic choice, we understand the character even more despite the writing being hard to digest in the beginning. Similarly, the abundance of metaphors may require a line to be read twice or thrice. It can be said that the author uses too many metaphors and sentences that seem out of place, however, the majority of Getting Here is spent in the narrator’s mind. The author, Henry Wei Leung, uses such uncommon metaphors to tell us more about the narrator’s background and pe...

Prove Them Wrong -  Fiction Kudashov Igorevich is born in Soviet Russia, with parents who firmly believe in the narrative of the capitalist pigs versus the Russian communism. At the age of ten, Kudashov tells them that he wants to play Ice Hockey in the United States. Their response could only have been worse if he'd told them he was interested in men. An athlete throughout all his childhood, his parents are usually supportive of his talents. They want him to be an Olympic pole vaulter, but his passion lies with hockey. This, they support. But they would sooner give Kudas up for adoption than let him move to America. As adolescence flies by Kudas' skills only grow. Speculation rises within Russia about where this young star will play his hockey. Will he play nationally? Will he play for the Olympic team? But his dream of playing in the NHL only grows. He keeps his ambitions a secret from all, with the exception of his manager. At the age of 20, his manager te...

My blog said that there was nothing here. I didn't like that, so I put something here.