 Thank you. Thank you very much. I'll try without a mic first. I did have a small cold, so if I lose my voice I'll revert. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. That would be great. Thank you, Shay. So I'm so happy to be here. We have been in touch for quite a while. Now I feel as I'm betraying you by not doing a talk on life-writing. Yeah, actually I'd love to do it. Love to think out loud about life-writing. Life-writing is another area that I'm developing quite a lot at Hong Kong New. That name has changed quite a bit in the last years. Of course it used to be called autobiography memoir. Then it just sort of expanded, and so now I actually went to a life-writing conference not long ago, and there was a juggler doing his life story in juggling. But what's very funny is I myself am a juggler. I grew up on stage as a child at Fevin in Vaudeville. So I thought, oh, I've come to the right place. So I was going to an academic conference and who should I meet but a juggler doing work on life-writing. So I really look forward to joining you and thinking more about life-writing here and across the city. This, I know it's late in the day. I hope you got your cookies and drinks. I hope you are, because I, you know, I could keep you for hours. I direct the theater. I don't know if some of you see that in the bio. I founded a theater at Hong Kong New and I also direct the MFA in creative writing. So I'm often teaching classes for three to six hours, which is why I tend to lose my voice at the end of the semester. And we have no clock in our black box theater. And so I usually stop class when I start to see everyone getting really hungry. And I start to look at everyone starving. It must be time to end. But bringing all that here today and to think with you about this sort of session is more on creative writing rather than, life-writing is not exactly that, but it includes elements, as many of you know. Today I'm thinking more about creative writing and in particular storytelling. I've, I was very lucky. I was brought to Hong Kong New for many reasons, one of which was at the time I was doing a lot of work in American critical studies, but then I was asked to reinvigorate both the drama program and the creative writing program. But that brought me very much back to what I did as a child speaking of Audible, which was to tell stories. On stage, you might not know this for jugglers because you wouldn't necessarily have come across it, but I learned when I was about seven that you could, for instance, we would rehearse five balls, six balls, seven balls, and then we'd go out on the street to street perform and there'd be some guy with like three balls telling a story and everyone would just pass us by. We would be doing seven balls frantically like, you know, like a rat naked, just juggling our heads off. Meanwhile, the guy with three balls going down to zero, he was doing down to zen juggling. Three balls down to zero, he got all the, all the, not only all the attention, all the money. So I learned very young that you actually don't need a lot to be a juggler. You kind of only need one ball and you need a good story. So I was then, as I grew up in storytelling on stage and in drama and in theater and in vaudeville, when I got to Hong Kong U, I was asked sort of several years into that to start up both the new theater and an MFA. What's really beautiful about being here and thinking about stories is the assumptions of what constitutes a story are just non-exec- we make assumptions about what constitutes a story. And I actually got my own MFA back at Boston University and I had studied with some of the top, you'll see them in a moment, some of the top writers. I studied with three Nobel Prize winners, lucky girl that I am. And what I'm realizing as I was starting programs here is that what constitutes a story really is, it has, it's not what we were told to think or ours to think much about when I was in the US, but there's a reason not because I wasn't working with top people, because it's monolingual. That makes a big difference. So when we're here and realizing that almost all of our writers are multilingual, suddenly what constitutes a story sort of broke out from all the assumptions that we had been studying, thinking about. And I wanted then to talk about genre in particular, because at MFA, for instance, as you know internationally, especially in North American models, you are admitted as a storyteller in a genre. So in the graduate program, you're admitted as a fiction writer, or you're admitted in poetry, and you don't normally in American classes switch genres. And it was interesting to me when I went to Boston University because Derek Walcott was there at the time, and he was doing drama and they didn't know what to do with him. And because they didn't know what to do with him, because of course he's a playwright and a poet, but mainly you enter on a single stream, they had him sort of open his own theater. So he opened a theater and instead of calling it a playwright's theater, he called it the poet's theater. So already you're starting to think about mixed genres with Derek. Of course he's not from a U.S. context at all. In that mixed genre work, and so I got to study poetry and drama with Derek Walcott there, and thinking about what constituted stories and why, what constitutes a genre. When I was, this is, and then I'll start this slide so you can see more pictures here. But when I was studying with Derek, and with many of the other writers there, and sort of talking about expectations, the expectations were, because it's different in the U.S. in which I had had creative writing classes when I was in elementary school, and some at least, when they were teaching a genre that is the shape of a story. So you can tell the story in a short story, you can tell it in the shape of a longer fictional work. You can tell stories in any genre. But no matter what I was told, because I'd been in that monolingual English language context for so long, there was no, it was in between. There was no sense that genre were rules, not word for word. But on the other hand, there was just a sense in which they were carried over. To make that point more accentuated, I went to Hollywood, I took a detour from all of that in Boston. I went to Hollywood and worked for Tom Cruise. And so I worked for the Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner Hollywood production company. And what was interesting there is not only where there are certain assumptions about what constituted storytelling, so you could immediately enter and begin to learn your genre at advanced levels. In Hollywood, you can make millions of dollars giving storytelling classes on models, which I'll show you in a minute, just, they're called beat sheets. Beat sheets, and those beats are what they tell you will make a successful movie. So it's sort of genre reduced to something like rules to help young screenwriters make money. But I was sort of struck at the time that, fortunately in my Boston University program, it wasn't rule bound, but there was still an expectation that what we're learning would constitute a story. So we're going to look at now in the time that we do have, and I'm not keeping you for three hours until you get hungry, but in the time that we do have is, I want to talk a little bit about what I've discovered here, teaching and multilingual writers, and how amazing, the reason I use full of wonder is, because the conversations I have in class are like no other. When we have visiting lectures come from Boston, and many of my colleagues come from BU, they never want to leave our creative writing classes, because the questions that come up never come up in the US. That doesn't mean there are other interesting questions that come up in the US, but they're not like. They don't have similar to do what comes up here, because the question of what makes the shape of a story actually is quite historical. I was very lucky when I studied at Harvard for the PhD, that I had to take six courses in the history and structure of English language. At the time, I wasn't sure why I had to take so many linguistics courses as a literature major, but actually Harvard's English department is, you get a degree from the Department of English and American Literature and Language. I found out the hard way you had to take all those courses, because you had to go and take all those. There was a kind of linguistic element, but not so much in what we think it was actually the history and structure of the English language. Genres like a juggling show are a kind of expectation, and that expectation is an invitation to a certain kind of shape. When I was taking the history and structure of English language, I realized there are expectations that the English language invites that when I came here later, I realized they are not what every language is. That's, of course, an obvious thing to say, but it's very rarely done that you look at genres through history, because normally we just say, and I'll show you in a minute, normally just say the character has to make a change in a story. I'm reducing it a bit. Or in a poem, you have to have a turn, so to speak. But those questions about where they come from and why do we have these expectations, and are they universal or are they not universal, or where is this beginning? That brings me to the beginning of this slide, because the question of, the question of where do genres come from? That's a real question. Where do genres come from? Because when I would talk to some of the students here in my creative range, both the graduate and the graduate classes, they would say, well, why does my character have to change? Now, of course, that's a good question, and there's no rule that a character has to change, but there is an expectation in English language stories, so that we begin in fairy tales in English, translated from German and French, to say, once upon a time, you draw a line in the sand, and then the expectation is the character will undergo a change. But the question of, does my own character have to change is a good question. It's actually not a silly question, because it's not as easy as saying, you can if you want to. You can answer a lot of stupid answers to that question, like, well, you can be experimental, but what are they experimenting on? What makes a character change, or what expectation is there, so that in fiction in English, we expect, we expect a character to change. That's different from saying we have to have a character change, and that's quite different. So one is an expectation of change, and one is, do we have to have it change? If we turn it to having to have it, having to have it change, that's a rule. Of course, there's no such thing. That doesn't exist. Characters don't have to change. But where is the expectation coming from historically? So, you can see some of these examples in English language history. These are not the same across not only Chinese and English, for instance, but even other sort of Indo-European languages. These are just some of the shapes that we think about when we're teaching. And more importantly, these are some of the ones that you can enter on an MFA program in the US. So you enter on poetry, or you enter on drama. What's interesting here, I put it in this order, is this is more or less in the order of birth of genres in English. So that's very, actually something most like MFAs in the US don't need to talk about. Somehow it's in the assumption we would get that in school. But in truth, poetry is actually, poetry and drama are the oldest forms in English. That's actually essential information if you're going to be a writer. And especially a multilingual writer, because the expectations that come out of poetry and drama are one thing. They come out of the medieval period and actually after what we call the post-conquest, post-conquest poems, post-Norman conquest. So you get poems that are produced in English, French, Latin and a mix. But later on, after it moves from Old English into the Middle Ages, we get poems in English, but they're in the Middle Ages. Those are earliest liturgical and they take place in the church primarily and also drama. Only hundreds of years later does fiction appear in English. So the birth of fiction is much later, much, much later. We'll see why that's so important later. And then by, so fiction, of course, these are lines in the sand, but fiction is often talked about as the board in the 18th century. Of course, there are a lot of fuzzy lines on that if you talk about edges between journalism and anecdote and penny papers and so forth. But basically, if you're taking a sort of long view, fiction was born in the 18th century. And then something like biography is more 19th century. Of course, they didn't have movies for a while, so you wouldn't get screening. But that, but we'll come back to why that's so important. Creative nonfiction actually draws, of course, creative nonfiction is what we're hearing about earlier on the essay. And that, of course, has a much earlier birth, but it's recently flourishing. And it draws very deeply from poetry. OK, but we'll come back to that in a minute. This many of you recognize as Sheamus Heaney because what I wanted to mention about genres and expectations is what do we have to, if we, if, what do we have to know, if we don't know sort of what, if genre is a form of expectation, people aren't sure what and you take away that as a rule, which in Hollywood, there are many of those that you can teach screenwriting by teaching X, Y and Z. Then the question is, what are we teaching when we teach creative writing? That's a big question. And academic institutions ask it all the time. And there's a really uneasy relationship between creative writing and critical studies in most academic institutions, historically. Sheamus Heaney was one of my teachers back at Harvard and it was very interesting because as a PhD student there, I was not allowed to take his courses in creative writing because the discipline was so, was so different. Now, why would I not be allowed to take a course from Sheamus Heaney? Partly because they were saying that, you know, creative writing can't be taught, but scholarship was a research endeavor. Therefore, they were sort of a historical university and we could only get degrees in which we could look at research. Not only did he teach creative writing, he taught critical studies. He taught modern Irish poetry and I was the T.F., the teaching fellow for it at the time and I looked at all the peer reviews afterwards. This is a course I was not allowed to take as a graduate student either. And it said, one of the undergraduates wrote, taking a course from Sheamus Heaney in Irish literature is like taking a course in the Bible from God. And I thought, I went to the president of Harvard and I said, I want to take the course from God. I want to do it because how long will we have, this is before he had won the prize, how long will we have someone like Sheamus Heaney teaching us Irish poetry? But of course, this uneasy sort of feeling about what constitutes sort of scholarship, what constitutes, what it is we can teach at all in creative writing is a big question. Derek Walker, that you can see, as I mentioned, at Boston University was also had a struggle because he wanted to do drama, which was also considered too performative. So again, the question is, what is it that we teach when we teach storytelling? Now, this is a very funny quotation I wanted you to see because this is from Lamarck, who as many of you know, he preceded Darwin by a little bit, same period. And he was talking about evolution and what it is, do any of you know a spontaneous generation? Did you study that in science class? So Lamarck felt that we were always in the process of getting better. So you can make, you can make, you could perfect the human being through any sequence from lower organisms to higher organisms. So for instance, in this case, he felt evolution was if you put hay with a sweaty T-shirt, you produce mice. So it had the idea of perfectability about it. So if you put these things together, you get a more perfect sort of result. So the question, so like this, this, this theory of evolution about how it is that we get, James, you'll recognize this, we have a writer here from Iowa. How is it that we get creative writing? The idea about Lamarck's theorem was it was not evolution. Lamarck's theory was you put things side by side. You put hay next to sweat and maybe you'll get a higher order like a mouse. That's sort of the idea. Of course, research institutions didn't want any of that. That's because it's not argumentative enough. It's not logical enough. Of course, Lamarck was superseded by Darwin. Basically, what Darwin did was to say, there's no perfectability in evolution. There's only survival of the fittest. So he wasn't, he took out perfectability. But more to the point about early at workshops in Iowa, this was on an early, during the founding of it in the 30s. Though we agree in part with a popular insistence that writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption. So that's like Lamarck saying, we can't ever get to God, but we can get mice out of sweat. We can do better. We can do better if we just put people in the same room. So we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed and we see our possibilities and limitations as a school in that light. If one can learn to play it, one can learn to write. Again, they weren't sure how and in the early days of Iowa, just as it was true as Sheamus Heaney, exile was sort of the norm. So there are a lot of barracks where the writers were put, not with the academics. Sheamus Heaney when I was there could not go to departmental meetings because he was not in the argumentative field of literature. He was in the other side. So the sort of side by side view of Iowa, which was very, which was a breakthrough at the time was to say, OK, we'll just put people side by side and see if we can get some perfected writing out of this organization. But we won't say it's taught. We won't go as far as to say we can teach it, not quite. Here's Menon that you might know as a Harvard literary critic. It's quite a long thing. Sorry about that. You can glance at it. But the one I want you to look at is to say people who take the second one, who take creative writing workshops, get course credit and can ultimately receive an academic degree. You can see the tongue in cheek, but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense, a scene of instruction with a body of knowledge that's transmitted by a curricular script. So Menon, Tony and cheek was saying he actually attended creative writing classes. Now he's a Harvard academic and he was saying, yeah, something happens. It's sort of like Le Marc. At the end you can say you can say there's one person, the instructor who's usually published a poem, but workshop protocol requires the instruction who shepherds the instruction. Notice not to teach it. Shepherds it. Not to lead it. And in any case, the instructor is either a product of the same process, a person with an academic degree or a successor has no training to teach anything. So you can see that deep reluctance in creative writing, which is because it comes out of Western history as well in binaries, which is either you're a genius, you know, right? The genius, right? Or, you know, on the other side of how we how we get knowledge. So and that's also part of the next slide. When we get now we're getting to what's really fun to see what comes out of this. So there was there was one thing I want to show you here. Yeah, so the question of what constituted these classes was just so important to back to where we begin, which is, first of all, can we teach creative writing? The big question, man. And if we can't teach it, can we shepherd it? Many of you will notice the biblical diction on that, right, which is, again, sort of the kind of innocent embodiment leading the sheep. But you won't say exactly where the transfer of knowledge comes from. Then you get the Harvard critic talking about sort of, you know, his sort of skepticism that we actually do teach it. But maybe something will come out of it like a mouse. We may get a good mouse out of a creative writing class. And then we come back to this question of sort of the professional writer. Can you train it or the sort of create the nature versus nurture question? This this is where this is where the where it's so much fun and comes back to multilingual writing. When you go into fiction, when I was in my fiction writing class in Boston University then, coming back to what can we teach? Is it can we? And the debate goes on. My my hope is that history will help us think more about it because history is rarely brought in. But this kind of diagram, do most of you know this diagram from creative writing? It's used in Hollywood all the time in different forms that has so many. There are so many pyramids out there. There are triangles, slanted triangles, upside down triangles, right? And so technically you can experiment with that De Numeau. You can have an early climax. You can experiment all across the shape of this triangle. But deep seedily it comes out of this. Fry tags pyramid you can see and sometimes they call it climax. Sometimes they call it challenge. Sometimes they call it conflict. And then you see that pyramid. That understanding of fiction is actually something that this comes from a book and a class I was teaching where you can see on that. Here's a here's a check mark another form of the pyramid where a character in fiction will undergo a change. So again, many of you know this. So I don't have to go over it. Cinderella is often taught as one of those first ones. So Cinderella basically has to it's a very old fairy tale. She has to produce an heir. So if she doesn't marry things won't work. So literally she has to eat a comedy in the oldest form of that term. So she has to perpetuate her community in the living stream. But she is stuck. So all her obstacles are on the left. All the things where she negotiates her social world until she gets puts the shoe on and they marry of course what they marry designated in an early fairy tales is that reproduction is on the way. So she has she has performed that comedic role. Again, she goes through a major transformation in that. And so you hear a lot of creative writer teaching somewhere between shepherding and teaching. They'll say something like this structures the art that conceals you only see a structure in a badly structured story and call it formula. So that's the problem because the last those pyramids often people think. Do I have to follow that because it's sure it's introduced a structure but it sure looks like formula. And especially in a multilingual context. But why am I following a pyramid like it just doesn't even have resonance not to mention sort of logic because it's renamed the diction changes and you say we're going to teach the structure on the fry. When you give the name fry tag diagram on a German name it sounds much more structural. Right. But if you say you know it's like doesn't it look awfully like a formula. It feels like a formula. When you are teaching this with no underbelly that thing really looks like a formula. He's trying to say of course that if you do that well no one's thinking of either the pyramid or the triangle or anything else. But nonetheless when you're teaching the writing and the construction right writers are makers. If you're constructing that writers will begin to balk if it doesn't make any sense for them about why they're following that pyramid. This takes us back to where the only thing I want to get to date. This is it before dinner. This is this beautiful. This is Pilgrim's progress which many of you know was considered arguably one of the first novels in the English language. Pilgrim that is Christian. He's named Christian there. And if you can it's hard to see this but he has to go through the seven sins. So you see you have these conflicts that have to happen for Christian and he has to go through each one before he gets to the middle which is the celestial city. So of course what's going on with Christian and why do we why are we even thinking about your genre. Why is fiction born with Christian. What what's going on between that pyramid and Christian. All of this is very historically based on you can see where Christian and the triangle come from when fiction was born as a language in English language history. It was after the reformation we know and many periods after and individualism was becoming much more important. We know there are a lot of theories about that period. The rise of the novel by Ian Watt bourgeoisie all of that but mainly in this context you actually have an individual negotiating the social world. So the priests were let go on the Catholic era and you have a single because in most drama and poetry of the Middle Ages as you know it's not singular like this. The idea that you'd actually have even one character that you'd focus on it's just emerging in English in this period but not incidentally and not because someone named Freitag it has nothing to do with naming anything. Naming is irrelevant. Every language every cultural history has births of genres and they don't appear at one point and then they do appear. It's not a matter of someone naming it or it's not an invention of a single author. It's not someone saying is that the rule and now we'll call it by that man's name and you know give it an experiment and give it fame. What's really interesting is this climb is exactly how pilgrim how Christian was visualized which is he was climbing up a hill and very much it was considered two things three things that are important for fiction a it was a period of considered what was progressive very rare at that time in English language history because that progressive notion was born out of that Calvinist and Protestant movement where history has a progressive you can basically what goes into the by like help those who help themselves right that sort of progressive element was born in this era post reformation when you have someone first having ability to progress it's an upward movement it's an upward movement and almost every image that you see in the earliest images of Christian that come out. Secondly it's linear in time this will make the most difference the last remarks will say at the very almost that it makes a big difference it's linear because in the linear negotiation it's why you can go like this right so that he can get rid of lust and he can get rid of sloth he can get rid of these things one after the other and make it at best if he negotiates each of those he can make it to the celestial kingdom. So the fact that it's linear the fact that it's progressive the fact that you even have a character at all at all is absolutely born into fiction is born into a religious and cultural moment in English language history. The act of transformation that Christian undergoes is what they later this is someone you might know called Rust Hill. So you get this stuffing creative writing classes which I got at BU and my own word says it's the moved character. Let us call the character to whom the events have consequences the moved character. But of course the characters the other way around characters moved individuals and moved out of the coral and community history in English language in the 18th century for political and religious reasons. So the birth of fiction is absolutely an expectation of transformation that's biblical in its root. That doesn't mean every story of course now is biblical or religious. It's root core in English language expectation. When you get fiction in English is you will have transformation on a moved character who will overcome social obstacles to undergo a major change. You often hear this in creative writing classes. Your character has to go through in a revocable change after which nothing is exactly the same. It doesn't mean you have to have an earthquake fall down. It just means that that moved character is not exactly the same and never will be again after that character goes through. But of course that's Christian. That goes back. That's what it doesn't come out of it. So when I start to talk to some of the undergraduates and the MFA students at Hong Kong U and I say this is where it comes from. They feel so relieved. They feel so relieved because their expectation that a character would change doesn't have any necessarily historical counterpoint for them. There'd be no reason they would have studied Calvinism, Luther, Reformation, English history in the 18th century. The ways in which transformation as a word sounds very contemporary or, you know, like Nike, let's do it. We go through this major change. Actually it goes back to biblical typology. And in that typology, it is very linked to the King James Bible, which is in turn linked to the act of typology which followed and how we studied it. And this idea that a character like Christian, what A, A progress B, move up. That's what many of the students I teach in creative they don't want their characters to progress or to move up. That has no instinctive sort of Velcro for them. And third that it's linear. So it's just this amazing when we go back to history, creative writing classes sort of start anew because instead of feeling as if instead of feeling as if, you know, am I writing in English, but should I be writing in Chinese or actually the thing is every language languages and each one has these sliding scales of beauty out there. When they start to understand why change is so important in English language history and that English language like any language is open to everyone and all of us, they become more interested in where genres come from in Chinese and where expectations come from in every language. That that core understanding that genre is not a set of rules and it's not a formula and it's sort of a structure, but it's only a structure if you go back to history. It's not a structure that's invented out there that you can then just sort of push out onto so what and say, let's try this structure and make a mountain today because they'll become bored. First of all, who wants to just keep making a mountain when you're told to make them right. It has no internal resonance. Second of all, it may or not be the story that actually fits with them about their wanting their character to undergo a Christian biblical root of transformation in linear progressive time to skip ahead for a moment. So you're making sure I don't cover the how much time do I have. I told you, I can keep you long. Watch out. Okay, great. Thanks. So yeah, that that that instinct about, you know, about storytelling suddenly they realize we are all we all have this raw material, but we all without thinking of it are culturally and locally charged, very young with what expectation we come with when we think we're going to pick fiction out of of the shelf. It's like going to a video store in the old days when there were video stores. And if I this happened to me in graduate school, you go and you're really ready for a comedy and you go in and you take it out and it turns out it's like Macbeth and it's not that you don't want to see Macbeth. It's just your heart was had expectations of characters in a comedy who are going to negotiate what they do and then re assimilate into the social stream with renewal. That's not what's going to you're going to see in Macbeth, not that expectation. Same here on the larger scale of language, that that that claim that students can then make, which is to understand what expectation they carry the minute they pick up the English language, every one of us the same. We all pick up if we start fiction English, we pick up the expectation just because we're writing in English. It is born. It is part of the history. Languages have speaking of life, writing languages have a life too. And their life has this history to it. And the more you know about whatever language you're doing, the more you can play with that expectation that you too are picking up where the character is making a progressive change. I'll just say one thing and come back to this slide. It was very interesting when many of my students in the MFA classes, the graduate students, a lot of them were just starting to balk at that linear scale. Most of them felt that their characters instinctively were not coming from linear time. And then they were talking to me about how that worked for them in Chinese. How the temp, in other words temporality, temporality is a big thing in storytelling. In fact, if you get books on some of the top books by Silber and others on storytelling, one of the first things they say is if you're a writer of fiction, you're concerned with time. But what they don't normally say is it's going to be this. You're going to pick up this old instrument of linear time. They make time seem as though it has this single sort of belly to it. But in fact, temporality is really hugely different culturally. How we understand temporality is culturally specific. It comes historically from from religious, cultural, social, political changes. And it really matters that students are given everything they need in history to understand what choices they have and more over what play they have to recognize like the rest of us, none of us. If I had anyone born or not born speaking English, any of us picking up the English language has that about it. We are because anyone picking up fiction in English has this drilled as an inner rhythm from biblical history in in English. This is just a moment. I won't I deliberately made it so you can't read. This poem has 12,000. No, no, so 1200 lines, 1200 lines. So what's very interesting about many of you, do any of you know Christopher Smart? It's all about his cat and his cat Jeffrey. So he wrote 1200 lines about his cat Jeffrey. Beautiful poem. Even those of us who get PhDs in literature, I happened to because I was studying poetry. Most scholars don't read all 1200 lines because this is just the beginning. What's very interesting about this is, so this is like Fragment B2. There are four of them. I'm skipping ahead to Fragment B4 for a moment. Later on, this is what this goes to genre and expectation. This is what you normally see in the anthology. Some of you might recognize this for I will consider my cat Jeffrey, for he is the servant of the living God, duly and duly. But notice this. For first, he does, he, I like this, though. For first, he locks upon, no, sorry. He looks upon four paws to see if they are clean. For secondly, he kicks up behind to clear away there. That's great use. For thirdly, he works, he works it upon stretch with the four paws extended. For fourthly, he sharpens his paws by wood. For fifthly, he washes himself. OK, notice out of all of 1200 lines for English expectation, they put this in the anthology because it's sequenced, because it's linear, because we understand this instinctively. There's a story going on here and the rising X, even though it's a poem, that rising expectation is it goes all the way up for 10thly. He goes in and out of food for having considered God and himself and so forth for he is of the tribe of the tiger. So it's this out of 1200 lines. The expectation for readers to sell their anthologies is again this very linear sequential progression where Jeffrey is doing lowly things like kicking up the dust behind his ear and then he's in the tribe of the tiger. This is very much like Christian making it to his celestial kingdom. This is progressive. It's linear. It's a story within the poem and it's excerpted and it's edited and it's not what the poet wrote. But this is again expectations we could go into long dot commercial. What is it that English language readers tend to expect? This that has the same pyramid, although it's a poem. That that movement about I'll finish up here so we can if there any thoughts together. The this is about genre in particular and notice there are different ways that people taught when it first came into the language in practical usage of 1816. But notice the one thing I want you to see that I just took these randomly was that relationship to genus which is the stock and kin which is that there's a common descent. Of course it's a stretch to talk about genre having this gene. But I do think it's important for students to understand there is a historical family kinship that storytelling has based on its own ancestors of where it comes from. All the variations we can make together as writers we have we are armed to the hilt the more we study that lineage just as when we know our own family is better and our own friends better. We have more play students who are writing often I students writing in English who after they learn about this they actually choose after the course to go back and write in Chinese with all that much more in sort of power and excitement because now they're going back to what expectations do their genres come from. Where are those histories and what what are they given to play with as a contemporary writer. So one thing one other last thing here. Yeah let me go to yeah this this one just one last one last remark before the very end. As I was saying about so fiction comes fiction has this linear history to it. Poems do not. I don't have time to go into the poems and drama section about what their history comes from but it's much more circular and cyclical than the progressive element of fiction. T.S. Eliot we know has this very famous quotation what we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from that that earlier poetic history again starts in English sort of old English and then in the Middle Ages that choral what we call a choral history the non individual one the community one has much more of a circle pattern to it in all kinds of sophisticated ways. What's interesting though about poems is they tend not to have an irrevocable linear transformation they tend to have more simultaneity in the history of the pattern what's really interesting is when I was teaching this in multilingual context and especially here in in the Hong Kong classes is that I just wanted to read you one or two of these from the classes which is to say that one writer said that when he came into he was so relieved learning this because he said theoretically I should use verb forms in my story simple past tense past tense mainly which can express a meaning in the past like my mother had met my father in Guangzhou however I feel once it was written in these tenses that's not my experience in it for how it feels to me it loses the intimacy of the temporality that I understand it's much too westernized it feels like a Hollywood director shooting a kung fu movie so you just that playfulness of understanding why his responses were not the resistance this is a difficult question it's almost like literary translation itself what do you do with writers who when they're writing in English and choosing to write in English understanding this history and then they're forced into sequential verb tenses in English to a large degree but experientially that's not that's not experiencing culturally and historically what they feel you can't write English that doesn't work so that editors think it's not been edited it's not that simple you just can't screw them up so much that right that editors start to think this just wasn't polished but you can begin to invent what it is you want to do with temporality understanding that as a multilingual writer your understanding of genre it's not an understanding of form it's not an understanding of the structure it's not an understanding of rules it's an understanding of history and the more that they understand that the more they just completely get excited about playing with something as that's going to like as concrete as what do I do with this verb tense how can I reinvent it so that on the one hand it doesn't sound too off the market needs to be edited but on the other hand captures something that this linear progression will never even attempt I'm always saying in the multilingual classes I teach at Hong Kong you there is such new writing coming out of here we eat so much ahead of the curve as you know I come from the U.S. almost exclusively monolingual there where writing is going to happen is exactly knowing our histories it's going to understand that genres I feel as I was given this like a little pet here I feel as I'm like stroking it here at the end genres like this little pet genres have histories they have lives they change their fluid they intersect this is just a glimpse to talk about how does poetry relate to fiction on the historical side it's not to make such a big line there's actually of course a lot of fluid just as there is in our own family history we're not made of compartmentalized pieces we're made of these spectrums but definitely when we're thinking about multi I think we can all feel so lucky here in Hong Kong that's how I feel to be here because we are seeing a kind of writing that has never been seen before I have so many publishers say when they see books coming out of Hong Kong that there's still somehow Western stories or they're like the Western like Kung Fu movies with the Western I are there somehow forced awarenesses are forced into this sort of trans history historical element of Western transformation but but we're not seeing but we're just now beginning to see those aren't the stories that are just brewing now we are seeing stories now that are unlike any others where no matter what the theme of the story is no matter what the subject we will begin to recognize this in a way that is completely different from what's coming out of North American and monolingual context so I'm really excited about what we're all seeing here and that you're joining with me I know you're all working in all kinds of writing out there history matters I think that's what on the reasons that we can say what can we do and create a rain to teach it if there's who knows what the answer to that is one thing we can do is go back to history that is one thing at the very least that makes a giant difference thanks very much thank you I don't it's up I'm open I'm anything you can ask me outside too if you're just thinking sure yeah oh yes yes of course the beauty of literature no matter for drama or fiction or poetry I think it's true understanding the the expectations what you mentioned yes the inclusive nature of genre yes we also can create dialogues with all those static yes descriptions of us and that as a creator as a writer yes creative writing no matter for life narratives or yes we try to have some conversations with the issues the values yes also the history embedded in the text so what do you think about this kind of theory and what's the relation between some theorists like the teams that are logistic to your current study about history genre and yeah that is yeah yeah it's a good question and back teams are interesting because of course he's become most famous for the dialogic and he doesn't really address poetry very much and he famously leaves it out I mean not exclude but almost almost exclusively I do think there's back he does really a critical theorist who's interested in how we how we analytically organize a text or it's almost out of back team we got a lot of movement toward reader response theory and structuralism and all those things I do think that what's a bit different here on the margin is on the one hand back team is looking as a critical eye on a text that's already made this work of history is looking at where texts are made as primary text as opposed to looking at them as secondary texts so his work is very beautiful I studied it I took exams on back team was so huge on that dialogic principle and so many different theories came out of it but mainly they do address the secondary work of criticism that we look at which is how it is how it is these voices right how the productive work of voices and the constructive voices and the construction of the reader that went into people like Yau and others who took up back teams work this is really historical work that's looking for those people who are not analyzing a text but for the ones who are making it so it's not that it's unrelated and in fact I brought back team into creative writing classes to Justin but this work is usually not brought into critical work because we're looking at why it is for instance if you have and this goes back to juggling in a little bit just in one sentence which is if you realize how hard it is to keep your audience it is so hard and creative writing to keep your audience it's hard to get them to turn one page it's hard to get them on a in a bookstore to like pick it off the shelf when they read the back and not put it down it is so difficult to get people to kind of turn a page this work historically looks at what kinds of expectations do people have where they like that Jeffrey poem they took that out because they knew if people read for first and for second they'll probably go for third this goes to what do we do as on the juggler on the street you could literally do seven balls you could do 11 clubs on the street people would pass you watch you for about to let me about 20 seconds at the most and walk right on by because you have not staged what your expectation is so this is really for writers more than for critics but a mix yet to help them understand how to build expectations and what their their language is a powerhouse of history what are what what is inside that language that they may not have known they're working with so definitely on the writer side of the world there yeah yeah yeah so do you mind giving us an example of like yeah yeah yeah so one of some of the writers I'm following like Koofe Coe who's on the publishing a memoir and he's working on a text where again on memoir which is more related to poetry in structure than fiction historically but he also was very much struggling with this question of temporality so he's talking about a snow globe that his father had given him when his father traveled to Chicago when he was little and his father then died and he was trying to write about his experience because he said when he was writing this this is in his memoir when he was trying to structure this memoir he was trying to organize this experience of the snow globe from as a child he realized when he was writing in English he kept going into past tense into when his father gave him the snow globe and the present tense of remembering that father when he was a child but he realized that his experience of the snow globe is not that at all that his cultural experience of the snow globe is when the father's not in the past giving it to him the father is continuously present to him and that he's continuously present in the moment of the snow globe and so the act when he put it into English in the past tense was actually falsifying the memoir that he was trying to deliver because it was creating a nostalgia that he felt was very western and that elegiac quality of looking back when he was a child to the moment when his father gave him the snow globe but actually he felt it's not at all like that for him then he was trying to teach me which I can't replicate about all the levels of that continuous presence then he was relating it to Hong Kong cinema saying where you see people on multiple floors where they're not connected by a linear staircase but they're taking place in the same time frames and so he is now restructuring that memoir to get rid of that elegiac western element but to retain an element of his father's death the element of memory but memory not on a linear or progressive time frame but on a simultaneous so he is we have worked a lot on how to work those verb tenses how to organize not just so the sentence isn't a different verb that's not it we know that writing is just like all our other sessions today writing is thinking writing is perceiving just changing verb tenses the minute he can get that we see something we never saw coming out of English language before and I asked him why did he want to write in English rather than Chinese for instance where it's he may be I'm now this is specious not true he said maybe a bit easier to do it in Chinese because it's in some way which I would not know fully it has and he was saying actually he emotionally thinks in English but that the design of the grammar in English that is so linear on verb tense does not suit this element where it's not an elegiac part of memory I think the moment we start to look at memoir as non-elegiac here because of Hong Kong craft we will change how we see everything just everything because it's that big it's looking at what cause elegi is giant in English language history it is just permeates the memoir to this day there's a beautiful memoir by Megan O'Rourke about her mother dying I loved it about about those kind of the long period of her mother's death but it is infused with this it is all about firstly and secondly and how her mother died incrementally and the elegiacast and it's magnificent but I showed it to Kufi and she said that's not what it feels like that is not it at all it's like the TS Eliot poem in Prufrock that is not it at all we are going to see not a change of language like that cause we're all using English we're going to see if we're lucky through all of this that we do new experiences we have never read in English before and that's what's so amazing that's why the lecturers never want to go home because they go back to America and everyone speaks English and they're back on the fry-tag diagram so to speak and it doesn't have all these intersecting historical planes they're just so beautiful so yeah I think we're going to see like a new wave of writings coming out and it will not necessarily be thematic on Hong Kong I don't mean it in that way at all we are going to see storytelling through a lens we have never seen before yeah anything else before it is truly dinner time and you're looking hungry you can talk outside thank you so much thank you very much