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OCA Creative Writing award winner Karen Gunning - We Are OCA

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OCA Creative Writing award winner Karen Gunning thumb

OCA Creative Writing award winner Karen Gunning

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date
 
OCA tutor Liz Cashdan reports on Karen’s winning story. Karen was Liz’s student.
It’s great that Karen Gunning has won the OCA annual competition prize for Creative Writing for her story “The Big 4-0”. Her story was picked out by the external examiner at July’s assessment as one of the best short stories he had read by a student for many years. For those of you who haven’t read her story the 4-0 refers to the character’s weight in stones, not age.  Karen says her story began as a response to the Level 3 Your Own Portfolio exercise called Body Thinking.  It led her, as she says to “specific observation” which of course is where all effective writing begins.  Sometimes this observation has to be imagined and then felt as well as being seen or heard.  Karen has succeeded in making the reader feel every crease and fold in her protagonist’s body.
Her narrative technique adds to the overall effect by her use of what you might call a second person narrator who addresses the reader asking them to see and feel everything described, whether by the narrator directly, or through the viewpoint of the protagonist herself.  The reader is taken into the narrator’s confidence and one of the clevernesses of the storytelling is that as readers, we are not always sure how far to sympathise with Gaynor’s feelings and problems or how far we should be judgmental.  As a reader, I have a sort of idea that the narrator doesn’t entirely approve of Gaynor being overweight and would hope that the readers would have the same opinion.
The story opens with an appeal to the reader:
Look, look at all the balloons bobbing about in the draught from the window – not    the old fashioned type, these are the silvery, rustling helium ones that stay upright on their own, weightless. Silvery pink, silvery blue, shaped like overstuffed cushions, all with 40 on them.  40! 40 Today! The big 4-0!
These balloons could just be birthday balloons but once you know they are celebrating Gaynor’s weight, not her age, then phrases like “balloons bobbing about” and “shaped like overstuffed cushions” take on a new symbolic meaning.  I don’t know how far Karen planned this: writers often find that symbolism creeps into their writing once they have entered the emotional empathy area and the body thinking area of their characters.
Here is how Karen gets her readers to do their own body thinking:
Imagine for a minute what it must be like, to carry that astonishing bulk. Hold your arms out to the sides, as wide as they’ll go, and feel your hips – they’re as wide as your arm span.  Your stomach hangs down like a great apron, you can feel it on your thighs, your knees. Now lower your arms – you can’t, can you? It’s that fullness under your armpits, it feels like you’ve got cushions under both arms.
What strikes me about Karen’s writing is that she manages to make an enjoyable  read and one that makes readers think about obesity and its implications for the obese person and their relationships; this is subject matter that if not dealt with sensitively and cleverly could become distasteful and patronising.  As Karen’s tutor on the final part of her OCA course, I count myself lucky to have been working with such an insightful practitioner, willing to listen to my suggestions and use them where it suited her purposes but also able to reject them where she felt her own judgments were nearer to what she was trying to achieve.
To read the complete story scroll down below.
[scribd id=160184654 key=key-1sy4ufcsowkrcwl3054f mode=scroll]
 


Posted by author: Liz Cashdan

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