And you are like that one thing
that’s just out of reach by
a hand that can only go as far as
a Facebook wall,
a box of badges,
a good picture on a memory stick.
Each day is a day away
from when you were here
and when you are not.
Moo MiniCard Holders (with cutting file)
I’ve been getting a steady stream of hits since MOO featured my MiniCard-holders in their newsletter and Inspiration gallery.
I use their MiniCards to promote ShootCake, my food photography sideline. The MiniCards are really bitty and supercute in that way all diminutive things are. When they were going to be included in the goody-bags at an event I was photographing, I realised their lilliputian dimensions would also be their disadvantage in the mash of larger business cards, tissue paper, and samples.
A card-holder seemed like the best presentation solution and I came up with a concept that referenced my work and allowed for the card itself to be showcased.
They’re easy to knock together if you have a cutting machine and the design software that talks to it. I altered a camera-shaped dingbat to fit the dimensions of the card, mirrored it to create a flip-open mechanism and inserted a vertical cut for the card to slot through.
I’ve been fielding a few queries to go commercial with these but my minions are as lazy as I am. If you have access to a Silhouette Cameo, I’ve made the cutting file available for you to download here*. The file allows for six card holders to be cut out of one standard 12×12 scrapbook paper sheet.
*
Camera-shaped MiniCard Holder by Saaleha Bamjee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
It could be verse
One of the first creative pieces I wrote outside the lines of homework was a little ditty titled Home, Home, Home. I was eleven years old and found soothing magic in that silly rhyme. I could manifest whole universes onto a page, just by casting some words about.
While the spells did little to vanquish the spectres that loom around an unrequited adolescent, the poems I wrote were innocent incantations wrapped up in secrets; taweez to pacify and protect.
I soon outgrew traditional rhyme schemata and found more space in free verse and bastard lines. That’s still the kind of place I like stretching out in and I’ve decided to focus on poetry for my Creative Writing MA.
How terrifically self-indulgent it is to tell people that I’m going to spend an entire year writing poems and reading them!
Between poetry and prose, I can’t say which is the easier to write. Both demand something different from the writer. I’d like to be versatile enough to be slave to both, but for now, I feel (and that’s the key to it really, the feeling) that poetry will be transformative. I may just find my voice.
The Fare [shortlisted- African Writing Prize for Flash Fiction 2011]
Home Invasion
We were introduced to the Black Box writing technique by supervisors Silke Heiss and Paul Mason in an MA seminar that dealt with conceiving the bones and sinews of a story.
Elements are chosen randomly from five categories; character, situation/incident, place/setting, time and theme.
These selections are then used to develop the framework upon which the narrative hangs.
Continue reading Home Invasion
Year Four
In this, the fourth year of Bamjee-Mayet:
There are no side-kicks here.
We save this world together.
—
Without you,
it was another lifetime.
With you
is all of this life,
all of this time.
—
Down in G’town – Days 4 and 5 – Quick Pics
The course supervisors continued their readings and seminars on Thursday while Friday gave us our first lick of the peer-review/critique-circle experience.
It was not the evisceration I expected but a valuable series of inputs and comments on the way we structured and conveyed meaning through our work.
I’ve been looking for this grade of sand-paper all my life.
Here are the last in my series of photos taken in and around the Rhodes University campus:
Down in G’town – Days 2 and 3 – Quick Pics
Day 2:
We spent most of Tuesday on a farm belonging to Robert Berold, one of the course supervisors. It is a generous space and when we weren’t being embraced by the heartening hospitality of our hosts, we filled our time sitting under the trees free-writing.
We left the farm early enough for me to still have a bit of time to walk through Grahamstown and take a few close-up pictures of the Cathedral.
There’s also a metal sculpture on campus that makes me feel like an unbound traveller, cycling into the Anywhere.
Day 3:
It was our first full day of readings and seminars, and as per my twitter/facebook updates, I couldn’t help but fizz with fangirl-adulation.
In this “The City of Saints”, the most interesting buildings to photograph often happen to be religious structures. The following pictures are of the Rhodes University Chapel of St Mary and All the Angels.
Down in G’town – Day 1 – Quick Pics
Registration at Rhodes was fairly painless. My Rhodent status is now confirmed by the requisite unflattering likeness fused onto plastic.
The day’s welcomes and introductions left me a with a bit of daylight to take a short photo-walk down Somerset Road.
Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA) on St Peters Campus, Rhodes University, and home of the MA Creative Writing programme.
When the Grahamstown gaol closed in 1975, it had been the oldest functioning prison in the Republic of South Africa.
