Richard Stupart

Those first blank pages are intimidating. Judgmental. As though the entire book might be spoiled with the careless stroke of a pen. As with any superstition, I don’t believe it. Not rationally anyway. But I go and buy six of my favourite pens. Just in case. Don’t go to the ball without a tuxedo, y’know?

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Today is day ten of fourteen production days at the National Arts Festival here in Grahamstown. Having drunk enough instant coffee to give my stomach a callous, I brought a bodum into the newsroom with me this morning. Mmmmm. Real coffee.  The days are spent busily climbing through every market stall, theatre, coffee shop and street for photographs. The evenings are spent catching up on the parts of my life which are not strictly arts or Arts festival related. Which is a polite way of saying “Dear god, I have been busy these last days”. Out of the chaos, however, are a few more images. And a promise of a story as soon as I have properly slept.

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Played by Bevan Cullinan, Gary the Tooth Fairy is a comedy play on at Festival in which Gary discusses life as a tooth fairy in modern South Africa. What was meant to be a simple photo shoot for an interview turned into an hour of running up and down the garden outside the Journalism building. Fairies are fickle creatures to tie down for an interview, you see.

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7am. In the Grahamstown rubbish dump, stilt-walker Richard Antrobus picks his way through old tyres, broken plastic and mud the colour of offal. Of all the places I thought I would find myself on a Saturday morning – in my entire life – this is quite possibly the very last. Richard is being trailed by a team of three Rhodes University TV students who are filming his antics in the dump as part of a series of twenty four one -minute documentaries on Grahamstown behind the scenes of the National Arts Festival.

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In lieu of more interesting content, of which there will indeed be some to come shortly (including details of the next substantial adventure and cavorting behind a camera for the National Arts Festival in less than a week), here is an interview. Some of the photographs will be familiar to readers, but there are a couple of others that I don’t think I have pulled out before that I hope you will enjoy. Thanks Jessie and Wandering Educators for taking an interest in my travels and photographic antics – I love you guys!

The night draws close and the world sleeps. Quietly, in my own silent space here, the walls remind me of journeys past. Places, so many places. Framed, worn as a purple Ethiopian scarf, a magic ring from Senegal around my neck and another on my thumb – haggled from a trader in Aswan. Reminders of the distances we can cover. Of how much can start with a thought.

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There is much that I have come to remember that I missed about university. Like learning – that feeling as though you are actually becoming smarter with each article read. Or that feeling of checking books out of the library  as though you were becoming wiser for the exercise. Like the  conversations that draw late into the night on the strings of ideas of the world as it could be. I’ve also come to remember exams – that periodic test of otherwise unshakable self-belief.

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Fingers press the stories insistently into the keyboard. Sometimes gently, or sarcastically, or desperately weaving something that happened into a wordpicture that my smile – or yours – will find in some time hence. Sometimes finding a story is hard. Sometimes finding it is easy, but recalling it is harder. Memory fades and few stories remain untarnished under time’s gentle and persistent breath. Other times they are as close as the ring that brushes the space bar. A gentle discomfort whose value keeps it close.

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Away from telling stories for a second, and on to asking questions of travel writing. Stylistically and storytellingly (yes, that is a word now) At Matador, the question occasionally pops up as to what makes for honest, compelling travel writing – the stuff that makes you read to the end, leaves an impression and makes you want to do something, change something, see things differently? In journ. class, particularly the literary style course, there are questions of how to make a story which is more than simply a recounting of events, how to connect a story so that it engages, moves the reader. For what it’s worth, these are my thoughts on what can work.

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The night is a cold place. Empty streets freeze imperceptibly under sodium lights. The warmth of human life dances and slurs elsewhere, its echoes stumbling out into the cold midnight darkness before slowing, stopping. Retreating in nervous uncertainty. Never crossing the gritty line that the cold wind carves between the world of those who revel in the night, who stay warm and safe, and others.
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