Update from South Africa
Well, I ended up dropping off.
It was a combination of my procrastination and also trying to get other projects done. I started this to hopefully combine with things like Skillshare, maybe YouTube, just any pivot to lessen how much I teach online (which is my main job).
My first project was designing and completing a poetry class for Skillshare. And holy shit did I suck at that. It took me forever to get comfortable on the camera which is really stupid. I’m on camera every day, for hours. But there was something odd about going from teaching/tutoring online to trying to video a class with just my camera as my audience. I always came off strangely stiff and was always forgetting what I wanted to say.
Combine that with my lack of knowledge in video editing and some equipment to work around and you can see why it was a struggle. I filmed, edited, reshot, edited, and even had a technology failure that lost a whole session, on and on until I got a good one. My final cut was completed by covering every hard surface in my office with blankets; I hung towels from a line across the room on a line—anything to kill the echo in my office; finally, I had a decent sound to work with. And I remember what I wanted to say, mostly, without sounding like I was reading a cue card.
So, you can find it here. It’s a workshop on using imagery in your poetry (more on that later).
And South Africa is South Africa. We’ve gone through a few bouts of Level 6 Load Shedding: that’s six hours a day without electricity. Here on the farm, we now have backup batteries that have saved my ass when it comes to teaching. But, my wife’s restaurant in the city is burning petrol like mad through a little generator that barely handles her equipment.
Oh, and I’ve decided to brave the rejection letters and enter a poem in contest. I dig the poem I’m sending in, but never over confident.
So really, my procrastination has just been about blogging. I don’t know why. Well, it may because I struggle with writing things like a blog or article. When I write poetry or do photography, I feel like my imagination takes over everything. It’s the same with some prose and filming the class. I close up and not express any of my personality.
I just got to remember to write the shit out of it…