In the beginning was the word
and the word was…….
The word being lonely, looked around for another word. Found it and from this union a third word was born.
The three words enjoying this activity, started to reproduce with great fervour and soon there were enough words to form a decent size sentence.
This sentence without any fuss, but with a comma here and there, plus a full stop, divided into two sentences, which in turn became three and on it went until a paragraph was created.
This paragraph, as part of the process, surprised us by climbing on top of another lonely paragraph and soon there were enough paragraphs to form a chapter.
This joyful creation of words resulted in more and more chapters, soon there were enough chapters lined up in a specific order, to one after the other, crawl between the covers and voila, we got ourselves a book.
In turn, and as a consequence, the book got read and when neighbour A heard that neighbour B got such a book he wanted one as well. This created the need for more books which in turn resulted in more new words needing to be brought into being.
Many of those new and special books were looking for a place to stay. From this need the first library was built. It also resulted in a new profession, that of the writer as story teller in print. The author was born.
And this, dear friends, is what we are celebrating during the ‘Words in Winter festival. Everything to do with words, books, talks, readings, book launches. Everything.
Then.
The Art of Throwing Words About in Abundance.
This for an event which had its beginnings in the mind of David Hall and from this thought David had, a festival was born. It’s title: ‘Words in Winter’. It was decided that August was the best month to have this festival.
Each of the events during the past festivals has been magically coloured by the ‘Generosity of Spirit’.
The generosity of Maya and her team who organised and ran the festival. The generosity of the owners of the various venues. The generosity of the people staffing them, etc. The generosity of the story tellers who would create and deliver their works, always of great imagination and originality.
The generosity of the audience. So important. Their applause reassuring those who told their story and encouraged those waiting to read, plus, those making up their mind if they should.
It is a privilege to attend these events, because what is really happening, besides the wonderful literary exchange, is the absolute magic and wonder of “A Community Sharing”. Sharing their story telling skills, their love for words, stories and, on occasions, revealing deep and intimate emotions. For this to succeed again we need the goodwill and love of each and everyone involved.
Those, who have attended these Words in Winter events, know these qualities exists in absolute abundance in our community.
There is more than enough to power many more magical story telling events.
Days of laughter, intensity, generosity and love. Very special and full of wonder days, days where words frolic about with abandon, where spelling mistakes won’t be detected, nor matter, days and nights of bending the truth and enhancing reality, nights where we enjoy colouring in the black and white facts of everyday life. Nights where the writer indulges his/her love for words and the audience wished it could do the same and, at times, found that it could.
In the beginning was the word
and the word was ‘welcome’.
Petrus
art@petrusspronk.com
p.s. A young student wanted to interview me, and did. He put the result on a youtube clip. If interested, Goto youtube and place these words into the search bar: ‘petrus spronk, the importance of the creative spirit‘
