Most of this year’s University of Otago creative fellows outlined their experiences during a lively 90-minute "Meet the Fellows" panel discussion at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery on Saturday.
Dunedin Arts Festival founding director Nicholas McBryde was chairman. More than 60 people attended.
Probably worst affected among the fellows during the lockdown was Caroline Plummer Fellow in Community Dance Kristie Mortimer, whose proposed project included organising dance events with offenders in prison.
Because of Covid-19 restrictions, she could not enter prison during the more restrictive phases of the lockdown.
"It’s hard to do community dance without a community," she said.
However, she had kept busy, and had ultimately "made it work".
She had developed dance programme material, including educational resources, some of it printed, to support future activities, she said.
University College of Education/Creative New Zealand Children’s Writer in Residence Elena de Roo said "it made me feel quite special" that she might be the only occupant of the Robert Lord Writers College to experience a coronavirus lockdown.
She had kept busy creatively and taken long walks around Dunedin North, finding the streets often empty, and life sometimes felt "surreal".
A poet and writer of children’s fiction, she said that "first and foremost I’m writing for the child within me".
Asked how he knew that a work was completed, Mozart Fellow Kenneth Young said it was partly instinct.
He "very rarely set out" with a particular musical form in mind, but this developed, and he later worked to ensure that internal transitions were completed well, he said.
Robert Burns Fellow John Newton said creative writing classes could teach technique, writing process and the need for hard work, but the approach also risked becoming technocratic.
He still believed in some Romantic aspects of the role of inspiration in creative writing, he added.
Frances Hodgkins Fellow Bridget Reweti was unable to attend.