the Apostle Annetta

I’ve just published a new creative writing course on the Udemy platform: Inspirations for Creative Writing provides a range of practical activities, ideas and prompts for poets and other writers. The course has around 90 minutes of video classes, with a range of activities and examples to download. It’s the fifth course I’ve published on the site and I’m proud that The Essential Poet’s Toolbox for Readers & Writers, which has been online for a couple of years, is a bestseller.

One of the things that the Udemy platform does for instructors is provide automatic captioning for the videos; but although this is a useful service, it isn’t by any means a perfect system.

Back in May, when I published the previous course, the blog post Not what it sounds like was prompted by some strange misunderstandings in the captions. I thought I was enunciating a little better this time, but the system doesn’t seem to have been any less confused by my accent. Which is where the Apostle Annetta comes into things.

In fact the poem I used as an example for the class on Translation and transcreation was La Barceloneta by Alexandre Plana. (I posted my transcreation here on the blog in Coast to coast.) That particular class in the course takes a look at the process of finding inspiration in a poem written in a language you don’t speak.

Another section in the course looks at using fragments of overheard speech as writing prompts, though I don’t think that would necessarily be apparent from the automatic captioning:

I do like the sound of “a fury in a bottle”. As for “those Slackm[e]n of conversation”, well they make me think of a kind of Slenderman lurking around and listening, which might, perhaps account for “the pain of other people’s conversation”.

I have been through and corrected all the captions, so no one will ever need to know that “I’m good at botox”, nor that there’s “some kind of sense saw real interaction” with a “hand-painted sooks golf.” But I did feel it was worth preserving these marvellous misunderstandings in a blog post, and in future I shall try and remember to think of the Apostle Annetta as the patron saint of creativity.

Incidentally, both of the course links above include a discount coupon code that is valid for the next week, so if you would like to do either course, just click the link or use the code SUMMER_INSPIRATIONS and you’ll get the course at the cheapest possible price. (The actual price will depend on where you are and the currency you buy in, but it should be somewhere around £9.99) The same coupon code will actually work for all of my courses just for the next week. You can find out more about me and find links to all the courses on my bio page on Udemy.

Author: don't confuse the narrator

Exploring the boundary between writer and narrator through first person poetry, prose and opinion View all posts by don't confuse the narrator