The week before last, Wind&Bones’s Will Buckingham was at the beautiful Tou Southwind café, with friends Naomi Sím, a countributor to our book Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese & Gaelic, and the crew from the Lâm-tõo Project, who run the wonderful Bookstore and Café Nothing, and who are active in events that promote the speaking of Taiwanese. Together, we were running a bilingual Taiwanese / English workshop, working with new learners of Taiwanese, and experienced Taiwanese speakers, on writing creative tales about family legends.
The workshop was a part of the government-funded Taiwanese-speaking Household campaign, encouraging families who already use Taiwanese to deepen their knowledge, and working with families who want to learn to upgrade their skills.
We presented the workshop mainly in Taiwanese—a language Will is hard at work learning. The group was a mixture of Taiwanese language old-hands, and new learners. At Wind&Bones, we have years of experience of working across different languages. We believe strongly in the way that literary creativity can cut across language and cultures, in often surprising ways. And one of the delights of this workshop is that by the end of the hour and a half, we had some participants who were entirely new to the language writing their first full stories in Taiwanese.
The workshop involved tales of crazy uncles, games exploring Taiwanese Romanisation, and a magic hat that gave its wearer enhanced skills in speaking this beautiful, fascinating language.
