Des 1. Anxious Collaborators

T. S. Eliot says, “anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity,” and that is exactly what The Willow Pattern 24 hour book achieved. Let’s all admit it, writers are a different kind of breed and throwing nine successful writers into a room to write, create, edit and publish a book within 24 hours, well their anxiety would have definitely been sky-rocketing with caffeine induced shakes. I have always believed that deadlines stifle the creative process and that you have to be in the right place at the right time to write; as I usually write in the late hours of the night alone in my bedroom when my mind is buzzing right before I fall asleep. However, the writer’s involved in Willow Pattern have changed this belief I have held so close and I would like to shake each one of the their hands.

The thought of collaborative writing, bouncing ideas off each other and meshing stories to create one final product is what Willow Pattern achieved, but at the end of the day it is not just about the final product, it's about the creative process and everything that came to be the Willow Pattern 24 hour book. The countless creating, editing, cutting, word counting, changing of the writer’s works plays a huge part of what the book means today. A year on and Willow Pattern is still making a lasting impact by allowing other people to explore and add their two cents into the process through digital media. Sometimes it can be easy to dismiss the process and just focus on the product, however there are pages and pages of data on the process of how these nine writers, fingers fiercely typing, created this masterpiece. That is the beauty of writing. It is subjective. Each of us interprets and obtains different things out of it.

Now a group of university students, including myself are collaborating and working together to create different representations of the book. Although each of us in this group are diverse and comprise of different disciplines, we all have one thing in common. We all desperately wanted to be apart of the Willow Pattern project after reading the brief because it is one of the most innovative, original endeavors I have come across. We, as a group, have been brainstorming ideas and generating responses such as blog posts, poems, letters, interviews and data analysis to make the Willow Pattern project as interactive and collaborative as possible.

So, similar to Ryan’s Haiku challenge, I propose you to write a free verse poem. Free verse poetry does not require any rhyming schemes, but does tend to employ other types of creative language such as alliteration, assonance and repetition. Think of T. S Eliot’s poems. However, there is one rule. You have to include a title of any of the nine chapters in the Willow Pattern book.