The writing Workshop at the Service of Literary Creation

To speak of a writing workshop is above all to remove certain misunderstandings, to twist the neck with distorted images that still stick to the basques of this practice. Writing school for some, therapeutic speaking group for others, the writing workshop is none of this. The approach is part of a genealogy with multiple branches. It borrows from the surrealists and OULIPO (the book of potential literature of R. Queneau, G. Perec, I. Calvino and many others); but it is also rooted in the innovative pedagogical research that emerged on the fringe of the school or university institution in France, or in the practice of "creative writing" taught in American universities for decades. What is a literary writing workshop? Curiously, while it has always been accepted that painting is learned, while the history of art abounds with examples of great painters who first attended the workshops of their elders before stealing their own wings, it was not the same for writing. Writing has, most of the time, been apprehended according to the "romantic" model of gift, of almost divine inspiration. The fairies had thus leaned over the cradle of the writer at his birth, and it was for him then to let this gift hatch. Few therefore elected, in the closed and jealous circle of writers chosen by the gods.

Genesis of the Writing Workshop:

The term "writing workshop" was born in France in the euphoria of the post-May '68. It is derived from the workshops of the Parisian fine arts. Students and teachers strikers had appropriated the places and tools that were there to produce graphic objects of their choice. This means that the workshops are linked, socially and symbolically, with this insurrectional movement through which civil society undertakes to expand its space to the detriment of a set of laws and rules felt as arbitrary. Applied to the field of writing, it is a question of developing a new approach of reading writing and exchange in order to rid the literature of the shackles of the school and university norm, to free it from the obligatory exercise of prostration. before the great figures of the literary pantheon. We also discover creative nursing writing in the American style, knowing that this practice, institutionalized for a long time in the United States, is not charged with this dissenting dimension. Hundreds of thousands of people participate regularly and these workshops have produced generations of authors. It is also in the post-May '68 that Elisabeth Bing, many of whom recognize the pioneering role, invents her writing workshops with character children, outside the school system.

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