About Aformes
THE CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR
Creative writing in the form of a seminar course was taught for the first time in a Greek university at the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Athens, in spring 1996 and has, for over ten years now, been nurturing the creative talent of the students that have enrolled in it.
The aim of the course is to sensitize the students to the many aspects of creative writing, while developing their critical faculties. The various aspects of composition—finding a topic, cultivating one’s personal style, choosing and publishing a piece of work, bringing out a book and reviewing it—are illuminated through discussion with distinguished Greek and foreign authors, critics, and other professionals in the fields that support the writing process.
Product of the course is the journal aformes that annually publishes the students’ best poems, short stories, and plays, edited by Professor Liana Sakelliou. The Creative Writing seminar is taught by Liana Sakelliou (poetry, short story). In the summer term of 2005, Professor Ελένη Χαβιαρά-Κεχαίδου taught playwrighting while, in the summer term of 2009, the American Fulbrighter Catherine Rogers taught dramatic monologue composition.
Watch the video presentation of aformes by clicking here.
THE CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR AT THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANAGUAGE AND LITERATURE
Creative writing has for many years been an established course in many university programs in theUSandUK. In Greece, the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Athens, is the first to include this subject in its undergraduate curriculum.
Creative writing in the form of a seminar course has been offered since spring 1996 and, in all this time, has been exploring the creativity of the students enrolled in it. It is a method which encourages the students to apply the writing skills they have acquired during the course of their four-year studies, their knowledge of literature, their theoretical and critical perspectives, as well as those unique personal capabilities we call talent.
The aim of the course is to sensitize the students to the many aspects of creative writing, as well as to develop their critical faculties. The various aspects of composition—finding a topic, cultivating one’s personal style, choosing and publishing a piece of work, bringing out a book and reviewing it—are illuminated through discussion with distinguished Greek and foreign authors, critics, and other professionals that support the creative writing process. This extroverted facet of the creative process which is socially diffused reflects at the same time the individual’s total commitment to the writing process, for which the presence of various guest speakers is meant to act as a stimulus.
The writing seminar is taught by Professor Liana Sakelliou (poetry, short story) and in spring 2009 by the American author and actress Catherine Rogers (theatre). In spring 2005, the seminar was taught by Professor Eleni Haviara-Kehaidou of our own department, who has supported the seminar from its inception.
a-formes
Product of the course is the journal aformes that annually publishes the students’ best poems, short stories, and plays, edited by Professor Liana Sakelliou.
In each issue of aformes, the students conduct their own celebration of the writing art: they appeal to the muse of poetry, devote themselves to her, and revitalize her. They offer her their best creations from a wide variety of subjects and concerns that stem from their own questions, usually arising from their first experiences in the course: “Why do I write?” or, “How do I choose my subject?”
The students studied the works of important authors, discussed their “special effects”, and were called upon to offer samples of their own writing, knowing full well that these in turn would form the subject of similar analyses. Thus, if the students felt that they lacked significant experiences to write about, they could acknowledge their own real or imagined experiences and turn their attention to the transformation of their content, like a sculptor choosing a pose for his/her model, a space, an expression and chiseling the stone into a new form. At this stage of the writing process, which may well be the same for every writer, the problem is not to find an appropriate model, nor even a stone, but how to chisel into art a new event. Is not this, after all, what we call “writer’s block”, the blank page, the empty computer screen?
In the writing seminar, distinguished prose writers and poets have spoken to the students, not because they could solve the particular problems related to the choice of subject or style, but because when an author shares his/her own experience of the writing process, the students can begin to imagine themselves in the same predicament, offering themselves their own testimony regarding what they understand to be the writing process.
In the 9 issues of aformes to date, the students offered their own answers to the question of what aformes meant for them. Moreover, inscribing themselves on the pages of the journal, they gained the freedom and the courage to ask, “What does writing entail?” “What reasons do I have for writing?” And maybe the next time, they may ask afresh. We learn to write by writing and only through the effort can we remember that which we had subconsciously assumed writing was all about.
As we are called upon to undergo the discipline, not in order to learn about literature, but to understand how literature is produced, we acquire more resources in order to evaluate literature critically, teach it, or use it in a language lesson. The School of Philosophy, University of Athens, does not only produce teachers, it trains individuals to think, to appreciate the workings of language and to use it creatively, to delight in the language of literature because they can appreciate its value. In this way, they make a contribution to culture, not only teaching linguistic products but producing artistic discourse whenever they have the inclination and the ability. Therefore, if we can train philologists, why not creative writers too?
forms A
The book with the anagram of aformes as its title presents the students’ best work which appeared in the journal from 1996 to 2006. Its publication was funded by the “Program for the Modernization, Expansion, and Support of English Studies” (Π.Ε.Δ.Υ.Α.Σ.), implemented in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Athens.
The texts which are anthologized in forms A reflect something of the zeitgeist of our age which determines not only the ideological questions that their authors pose, but their creative choices as well. The texts reflect the knowledge that creative writing constitutes a negotiation between the necessary artistic illusion and that which first emerges from our mind’s core. We are presented with the cultural product of young creators, and through that with their responsiveness to language, their experiences, their capacity for introspection, their imaginary life, the force of their memories, their readings saturated with the interpretations and the teachings of all the colleagues at the department during the four-year undergraduate program.
We believe and hope that these texts will prove valuable for the reader too, if not as a means of approaching the position of the author, then at least as inspiration for a comparable turning of their inner self outwards—something which essentially strengthens the inner life. If it is indeed the case that writer and reader have equal power over the creative process, then creative writing can be considered an activity which continues to act upon and affect the reader much more than the author had originally intended. To the extent that the following texts will facilitate this process, so our faith in the art of creative writing will continue to be vindicated and gain testimony.