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.