Creative writing is both a piece of cake and the hardest thing. Sometimes the gap between our intuitions and their verbal formulation is too big, sometimes joyfully narrow. On top of that, a new linguistic or cultural milieu will make it harder for any writer to gain traction and develop a concerted writing practice.
In early 2023, with the generous support of Kone Foundation, Sivuvalo inaugurated the permanent Spanish- and English-language creative writing workshops, as a part of its Free Services for Writers. A total of 25 writers from Scotland, USA, Spain, Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Italy, Russia, and Finland have participated over the course of the first 18 months. The most consistent group is currently made of 14 participants. Most of them write directly in English or Spanish. Others in French, Italian, or Finnish.
This section is intended to showcase their first—carefully honed—pieces of literature.
The criteria to determine a poem or a short story’s quality is complex but not wholly subjective. Each literary genre has a set of linguistic building blocks and an underlying symbolic structure. Understanding (even intuitively) these elements—their functions and interplay—will save any writer hours of effort, months of confusion. With the help of their peers, benchmarking from carefully selected examples, our writers learn how to strike a balance between literature’s contradictory needs: context vs. concision, reason vs. folly, instant vs. chronology, the character’s desire vs. the world’s resistance, etc.
Although the workshops are not intended to become seminars in literary theory, whenever needed we impart theoretical notions with practical implications. Thus, the writers gradually become acquainted with specialized terminology (enjambment, isotopy, focalization, etc.) and develop a notion of how broader concepts like modernity and postmodernity, tradition and avantgarde, come to bear on their writing.
“Floodwater” by Pauliina Korento (1999, Oulu, Finland) is the first installment of our New Finnish Writers series. Sara Sneck (b. 1992, Uppsala, Sweden) shared with us a selection of her most recent poetry, in the Finnish original and the English translations. Our latest installment is Meghan Smith’s (b.1981, New Orleans, U.S.A.) “Amber Waves of Gray.”
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