Creative Matters

Small Talk

Authors

  • Marjorie Kanter Independent author, word artist, trainer and investigator

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5463/ejlw.5.184

Abstract

Words matter.  Actions matter.  The same word, the same action can sometimes mean something quite similar to author and reader, yet at other times something very different from writer to reader and reader to reader, and yet still carry meaningful meaning.   At the outset, I write for myself, to help let go of, enjoy, work through, understand, save a thought, an experience, a gesture, an encounter... When I decide to share my writing formally, it is because I feel I have reached a corpus that will be meaningful to others, that it can stand alone without me.  Most of my writing is a reflection of real experience, either a short interact between several people or a reflection on life in feelings or thoughts. 


This piece was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on July 10th 2015, and published on February 21st 2016.

Author Biography

Marjorie Kanter, Independent author, word artist, trainer and investigator

Vitae

Marjorie Kanter (Delgado)

www.elasunto.com/mkd.htm

margiekanter@gmail.com

Independent author, trainer, word art installer, public interactive word performances and investigator.

Author of short literary and poem-like pieces, Marjorie Kanter holds degrees from Ohio University and the University of Cincinnati.  She first visited Spain in 1965 and has lived between Madrid and Tarifa for the past 27 years.  Author of "I displace the air as I walk", "Small talk", "The Saddle Stitch Notebooks", "The Bagged Stories" and "Im/politeness: One Hundred Im/polite Days" amongst other texts, she has participated in Public Word Art Installations and Interactive  Projects at La Caixa, Lleida (In-Comunicación); La Noche en Blanco, Madrid (Historias para la Espera) and for Madrid Abierto.  She is a researcher of Paul Bowles and his mixing of Codes in particular.  She gives workshops and seminars in creativity and writing.  She has presented her writing and offered training in events with The University of Alicante, the Contemporary Writer’s Forum of the University of Siegen, The University of New Orleans Masters Program in Creative Writing, La Caixa, Lleida, The University of Minnesota, and others.  Her conference presentations include mixing creativity and research in various areas of linguistics at conferences such as Creating Characters, Inventing Lives:

The Art of the Self and 2nd International Symposium, Barcelona, Spain,

Performing Tangier (Morocco), The International Short Story Conference (Alcala de Henares and Vienna), College English Association (St. Petersburg, Florida), Contrastive Linguistics (Santiago de Compostela), Discourse Analysis (Valencia), MESEA (Pamplona), Pragmatics of Human Communication (Madrid), Popular Culture (Boston, etc.  Her workshops focus on the process of opening doors to creativity and writing and an exploring of social, psychological and cultural issues for living and for writing.  She considers herself a creative ethnographer, mixing her training and professional experience as a Speech Therapist (1965-1985) and her interests and studies in the areas of communication, linguistics, language development, psychology, sociology and interculturality with her found creativity.  In her writing, she strives to mesh (all) her different selves, experiences and interests.  "Writing found me.  A need to communicate with self, take distance, get inside my feelings and experiences, all provoked me to keep journals that slowly turned into finished poem-like pieces often in narrative form.” 

Published

2016-05-07

Issue

Section

Creative Matters