Re-Writing Memory Seminar

We give great meaning and weight to memory, eye witnesses accounts, childhood stories, and traumas, and yet, everything we experience passes through multiple filters within us. Is it important to know whether something is true or not? Should storytelling be concerned with ‘the’ truth or with ‘a’ truth?

In our seminar this semester, we invite you to join us in discussing the intersection of memory and storytelling. How do we approach our memories? How many times do we remake a memory while re-telling and re-imagining? Do we see them as fiction or non-fiction? Does collective memory begin where the individual memory ends? Or is it possible for them to co-exist? Is nostalgia a political consequence, or an individual re-telling of a collective story? These questions will be raised throughout the semester through discussions, both within the group and with guests.

The aim of the seminar is to create a space where everyone can work on their own projects but within a collective, constantly receiving feedback, so that our works can be improved better. Having a writing collective in the space will also help us to develop our skills in giving and receiving feedbacks as well. Within the seminar, there will be reading sessions each month and participants are encouraged to share their writings with us. Although, the seminar will be held in English; our hope is to reach as many people of KHM as possible so that there is at least one other person who speaks the language you write; but if not please don’t be shy to share your writings in English even if it’s not your writer language.

Guests in the seminar will include people involved in publishing, editing, writing (both literary and script), and translators. With these guests we want to be able to examine both our own writings and the industry itself.

In the end of the seminar there will be a reading event which will be organized in a more public setting; so that the participants can share what they did throughout the semester with people from outside of the seminar.

Kontaktperson: Eylül Kizilirmak