The 2nd International Conference on Creativity and Writing was at 2010 Orivesi art College as part of European Network of Creative Writing Programs Table of Contents edited by Risto Niemi-Pynttäri Department of Arts and Culture, University of Jyväskylä rniemi@camps.jyu.fi James Richardson, Plenum Lecture Proverb, Aphorism, Poem Abstract: I am a Hard-Working Poet struggling with an addiction to one-liners -- aphorisms, maxims, apothegms -- which I sometimes think of as the Fast Food of Literature, maybe the potato chips of literature. Finland has an Aphorism Association, aphorism contests, an aphorism blog. But when I started writing aphorisms 20 years ago, I was the only living U.S. aphorist I knew about. When I presented aphorisms at readings people weren't sure what to call them -- the word "aphorism" was unfamiliar. They would come up to me and say "I liked your.... proverbs." That's an interesting confusion: it seems half-true. But only half. I would like to think about the generic differences among aphorisms, proverbs and poems. And the practical differences, the differences in where they come from, how they get written. Biographical note James Richardson, poet, professor. He has got several awards, and he teaches at University of Princeton. James Richardson became an academic and a poet by the usual means, but he is, by his own admission, an accidental aphorist. He regarded Vectors (2001), his book of five hundred aphorisms and ?ten-second essays,? during its construction as ?often? more as a questionable habit than as a book in progress.? The book became a cult favorite almost immediately. Daniela Beuren Sounds good, but what does it mean? Foreign languages as a source of creative writing Abstract This paper explores the possibilities of using foreign language elements in creative texts. Appropriating a foreign language by incorporating it in and as poetry, engaging in multilingual writing and thus creating a language of one?s own: all of this can be fun to do, but is it fun to read or hear? How much does an audience have to understand to be able to enjoy such texts? And how can creative practices of this kind be encouraged, or taught? The examples to illustrate these practices include pieces by Hillary Keel, Ernst Jandl and Michaela König and the author of this paper. Daniela Beuren lives in Vienna, Austria, where she works as author, translator, compiler of crossword puzzles, and part-time lecturer/teacher at the Centre of Translation Studies (University of Vienna). E-mail: daniela.beuren@univie.ac.at Kristian Blomberg Editing as Contemporary Ars Poetica In this article I consider the role and possibilities that editing has in contemporary poetics, and role it could or should have in creative writing programs. Kristian Blomberg poet, translator and literary scholar, just finished his dissertation of René Char's poetic devices. Writing studies in Networking -project of Finnish Academy 2010 ? 2012. Chief editor of Tuli&Savu, the leading Finnish poetry magazine. Helen Brunner ?Comme ça pour le plaisir?? Abstract ?Comme ca pour le plaisir?? is a quotation taken from The Little Prince of Antoine de Saint - Exupéry that in a few words summarizes the subjects I want to discuss. Is there only pleasure in creative activities? How much creativity is related with painful parts of our inner world? More in specific: has writing to do with separation issues? In the first part of my paper I will try to answer to the above questions exploring some psychoanalytical concepts, their relationship with creativity and in particular with writing. I will therefore deepen Sigmund?s Freud?s notion of sublimation, Donald W. Winnicott?s concept of transitional object and Melanie Klein?s ideas about reparation of destroyed internal objects. In the second part of the paper, instead, I will talk about the Edizioni Pulcino Elefante that is a unique case of creative writing and Publishing House. I will also propose some examples of the exhibitions I have organized where the work and the books of this publishing house have been showed. Keywords Sublimation ? transitional object- reparation ? Edizioni PulcinoElefante Biographical note Helen Brunner was born in Cambridge (UK) and lives in Trieste (Italy). She is a psychotherapist that works in private practice. She is also a counselor and a trainer. She has published several articles on professional subjects, family stories and genealogy topics. She is the author of the book Come un pescatore di perle ? ?Like a pearl diver?, 2001 and the editor of (Rap-) presentazioni ? ?(Rep-) presentations?, 2005, both published by Ibiskos Editrice, Empoli, Firenze (I). In the last years a number of books with her lyrics have been published by Edizioni PulcinoElefante, Osnago (Lecco) (I) Mónica Crespo The creative writing workshops: Sociality and symbolic construction Abstract: I have been teaching for ten years in creative writing workshops in public workshops, in libraries and cultural centres in the Basque Country (North of Spain). I would like to introduce my experience teaching and researching in this domain. When I began to study at university I decided to study Sociology even though I loved Literature and that was the field I was interested in. But in school and after, all the approaches to the literature I knew were based on memorizing and composition rules. I wanted to write as to learn how to do it. So I found in Sociology a way to study literature as a subject and to research about it as an object. Keywords: Creative writing workshops, methodologies, sociality, literature, symbolic constructions, literary experience. Marina Gellona ?Alone in the Wild Wood? Abstract The aim of this paper is to present my personal teaching experience. I currently teach how to write a fairy tale in creative writing workshops and courses. The paper will present my different projects on the subject, the approach I follow, the methods I use, problems and results emerging while working with people of different ages willing to express themselves through a fairy tale. Biographical note Marina Gellona: degree in Philosophy and diploma at the Scuola Holden of Storytelling in Turin, currently working at the Scuola Holden as teacher, editor and researcher. Teaching storytelling to kids, teenagers and adults. Working experience in various institutions: museums, research centres, foundations, theatre companies. Publications: a tale in the anthology ?Via dei Matti n. O? published by Terre di Mezzo an essay on teaching Italian for the Scuola Holden. In 2009 I have founded ?il Circolo della fiaba? (the fairy tale club), a research centre that aims to rediscover, the act of telling and inventing fairy tales. marinita.gellona @gmail.com Scuola Holden, Turin, Italy Christian Ide Hintze: poetry in times of transition 7fold poetics Abstract: from oral to literary, from literary to multimedia from analogue to digital from 1directional to multi directional Biographical note: christian ide hintze (born 1953) lyric & multi media poet. author of performances, tapes, books, installations, exhibitions, super 8 films, pamphlets, posters, cds, dvds & internet sites. inventor of instruments. creator of a 7fold poetics. christian ide hintze serves as the director of the vienna poetry school. http://www.ide7fold.net Outi Kallionpää Teaching the Essential Understanding of Creative Writing Abstract In my Master?s thesis I have researched teaching of creative writing for high school students. I have also created the concept called the Essential Understanding of Creative Writing, which I think is the base and the starting point of teaching creative writing. The term is hypothesis and it roughly means the subjectively understood essence of creative work and writing process, as well as the strengthening the inner motivation and author identity by writer. Collaboration seems to support the Essential Understanding of Creative Writing. That is why I have designed the teaching material using collaborative methods like role play and e- learning. Biographical note Outi Kallionpää is working as a High School teacher of Finnish and Literature. She is preparing her doctoral thesis at Jyväskylä University. She explores the teaching of creative writing at High School, specialised in collaborative creative writing methods in social media. She also writes columns, articles and prose. outi.kallionpaa@jyu.fi University of Jyväskylä, Arts and Culture Studies Vesa Lahti On the Process of Translation Abstract The topic is linked to my research for the University of Jyväskylä/The Department of Literature/ Creative Writing. The source material consists of the original texts, translated texts, interviews with the students, discussions and emails. We (Professor Tuomo Lahdelma and Vesa Lahti) have been teaching the basics of translation to the students of the University of Jyväskylä for several years (2005-2010). The course goes by the name The Course of Adaptation and Translation and is meant for all the students who can link it to their studies and who are interested on translation and adaptation. The choice of the source text is free. You can choose any kind of text you prefer: novels, poems, newspaper articles, comic strips, song lyrics etc. We give the students some basic information about translations` history, translation techniques, the process of translation and we do some short translation exercises during the lessons. At the first point the students select their source texts and produce the first translated version. We examine the produced text together as a group or team. The translator receives the feedback from the teacher and from his/her colleagues and gets back to work for the second version. When we are handling with the second version, we are focusing to the language and style the student has produced and we discuss about the problems of the translation trying to find out suitable solutions for the translator. There may be also a third version. That depends mostly of the time we have in use and the interest of the translator to start with still a new version. Biographical note Vesa Lahti is a MA of Creative Writing and a postgraduate in the University of Jyväskylä. He is writing his doctoral dissertation which is a research of the process of translation. The focus is in the process, not in the exact result. The purpose of this research is to find out the benefits and disadvantages of teaching translation the way we usually teach for instance creative writing. One of the main facts is to examine the problems of different phases and how the teacher and the student act and work. There is also the question of author, authorship. Important is altogether to examine the creativity and criticalness of the translator and the roles of the teacher as a guide and colleague and the position of the translator/student. vesa.m.lahti@jyu.fi Literature/Creative writing Department of Arts and Culture, The University of Jyväskylä Christiana Lambrinidis Pedagogy of a Center : Madness, dyslexia and banned memory perform writing at the edge Abstract With over twenty years experience in the art and scholarship of creative writing as a polyphonic creative form, I would like to present a paradigm forged out of the unspeakable sites of human existence in constructing narratives that transform incoherent monologues to social consciousness and social consciousness to a praxis of building literature. Examples will focus on three new writers from Greece who completed their books, Le Train Sucrée (Elena Alyssadratou), Lacquered Tongues (Alexandros Aidonopoulos), The dyslexic mouth of bilingual monsters (Stephanos Papadimitriou) inhabiting constitutions of self in the treacherous registers of power to construct visible and invisible subjectivities in their quests for textualities uniquely their own. Biographical Note Christiana Lambrinidis is a playwright, director, scholar of creative writing, educator, essayist, lecturer, editor and activist. Lambrinidis received her MFA degree from Brown University (US) and her B.A degree from Wellesley College (US). She mentors, teaches and organizes writing & performance projects with literate and illiterate women, borderland populations in conflict, street kids, immigrants, refugees, professional urban populations, adolescent boys and girls, youth workers, university professors, children from elementary inner city schools, health workers, and university students. The collective writing performances she stages and directs have been produced in Antwerp, Galway, Athens, Komotini, Thessaloniki (Greece), refugee camps, New York, United Nations. She collaborates with the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the Forum of Left Feminists, International Association of Lesbians and Gays, the Onassis Foundation, Woman in Black, international film festivals, universities, schools and local government. Lambrinidis was awarded the Lillian Hellmann and Dashiel Hammett award by the international organization HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH. Her own plays have been produced in universities and foundations around the world: Harvard University, Brown University, Wellesley College (US), Paris VIII (France), York University (Canada), Adelaide University (Australia), Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio, Italy). Lambrinidis is the editor of the first feminist publishing series in Greece, ?women?s writing+theory/ literature/philosophy?, Kochlias Editions, 2002. With women, refugees and members of the Turkish minority in Greece, she co-founded (W)rightful ? a write to right, a NGO that restores dignity through writing and performance, affiliated with the international organization of Women?s World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Development (2000). Ms. Lambrinidis was the founding Director of the Center for Creative Writing & Theater for Conflict Resolution, in Athens. She currently lives in Amsterdam on a writing sabbatical. Linda Lappin Deep Maps & the Soul of Place: Techniques for Creative Writers and Teachers of Creative Writing In his poem, ?A Lost Tradition,? the Irish Poet John Montague writes: ?All around, shards of a lost tradition/?The whole landscape a manuscript/We had lost the skill to read/ A part of our past disinherited.? In that poem, the Irish context, the search for an identity connected to a land, territory, tradition, and language, is very specific ? but the imaginations of many writers today will resonate to those words ? The whole landscape is a manuscript we have lost the skill to read.? This paper deals with the deciphering of that manuscript and will give some suggestions on learning how to read the language of place and landscape and translate the signs and stories of that language into our own writing. The original context of the experiments which I will be describing in this paper was a creative writing workshop for undergraduates, but the approach outlined here can be adapted to any creative writing context and to writers of any age. Biographical note Linda Lappin holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She teaches English at the University of Rome La Sapienza and creative writing at the USAC study abroad program in Viterbo, Italy. She is the author of two novels, The Etruscan and Katherine's Wish, the latter dealing with the life of Katherine Mansfield. She is associate editor of Serving House Books. Website: www.lindalappin.net Risto Niemi-Pynttäri Creativity and Publicity Abstract I am asking, how the writer can anticipate the reader I the text and also the audience of possible readers. In the process of writing the audience is not present, but the text is addressed at them. That is why the audience can be ignored or it may become invented or imagined. Publishing in social web opens many possibilities for sophisticated reader-writer relations. But the situation is not totally new: from prose narration we can find strategies of implied reader and fictionalized audience. Biographical note Risto Niemi-Pynttäri, PhD, senior assistant of Master?s Program of Creative Writing, Writing at weblogs and eZines. Research interests are collaborative writing, editing in the time of instant publishing and new publicity of social web. Main publication is Verkkoproosa (2007, webprose, study of dialogical writing in Web). Department of Arts and Culture, The University of Jyväskylä rniemi@campus.jyu.fi Marlen Schachinger Literary Writing at the Workshop for Artistic Professions in Vienna : Opportunities and Imponderables of Instruction Marlen Schachinger has studied Comparative Literature at University of Wien and since 1999 she is a freelance author. She has published four novels, quite a number of short stories and some poetry. She is teaching Literary Writing at the Workshop for artistic professions (WAP) in Vienna. Since 2010 she is the program manager, too. Since 2009 she is writing her dissertation about writing schools in Europe and the USA. Sylvia Petter Warming Up Before Sitting Down : from online to inter-face writing support Abstract As an Australian writer having lived most of my life in countries not of my mother tongue, I have employed various strategies to warm up before sitting down to write. These range from online writing groups and exercises, snailmail collaborations and mentoring to inter-face (face-to-face) workshops and conferences. Ultimately, it is when the seat of one?s pants is on the chair, when the pen touches the paper, when the fingers hit the keyboard, that the writing gets done. Thomas Edison said that ?Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration? (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison). Let?s give creative writing a bit more leeway, say 95/5. And it?s that 5% of inspiration that I want to talk about, for we all know that the rest is hard work. Biographical note Sylvia Petter is born in Vienna, grew up in Australia and, after more than 25 years in the Geneva area, now lives in Vienna, Austria. She started writing fiction in 1993, and her poems, articles and stories have appeared in print and on the web. Her agent is Margaret Kennedy of the Margaret Kennedy Agency in Brisbane, Australia. The Past Present, her first collection of short stories, was published in 2000/2001 in paperback and ebook formats by IUMIX, UK. Her second collection of stories, Back Burning, won the IP Picks Best Fiction Prize and was published in 2007 by IP, Australia. She has attended workshops and writing conferences in Austria, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, the UK and the US, and has done correspondence courses through the Humber School for Writers, Humber College, Toronto. In 2009, she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at UNSW, Sydney, and is working on her second novel. For samples, see The Lab Floor at http://www.sylviapetter.com. For several years she was a member of the Geneva Writers' Group, the NSW Writers' Centre (Australia), and International PEN (Swiss Romande Chapter). She is currently a member of the Australian Society of Authors, IG AutorInnen (Austria), and Sydney PEN. Amparo Seijo The Physics of Fiction Abstract What is the relation between narrative fiction and reality? Has verisimilitude anything to do with our real experience and the rules that philosophy and science have formulated to set a common understanding of the physic world? One of the most important conditions that narrative fiction tends to accomplish is to mimesis reality by including references that the reader could easily identify. These references, borrowed from the real world, help the reader to recognize and understand the meaning of the story. Virginia Woolf defines fiction as a spider web that is laying above reality, but still connected to reality through its corners. Extending further this concept, we can say that every time the readers identify these references that link reality and fiction, they understand the text based on their own experience. The links between discourse and reality include both objects and the relations between them. This last subject, relations, is more complicated to isolate and identify because it is less plastic, so science and philosophy tends to define them by developing models that brief the main rules and principles that commands in physical world. During eighteen century, science and philosophy formulated causality models that were based on a logical sequence of action and reaction relation between objects. These models have been adopted by writers, as Edgar Allan Poe, to increase the verisimilitude in narrative, to define the plot and to create a sense of unit and meaning that any reader could easily appreciate. However, the rise of new philosophical and scientific models during twenty century has changed the common conception of reality among the readers. Nowadays, any reader knows about chaos or relativism or system models that change and observe complex relations that are far away from causality plots. Some writers from the early twenty century, as Virginia Woolf, experimented with new ways to tell based on non causal relations. Although their influence in literature is unquestionable, their work is still considered experimental and as a personal way to understand writing. However, there are some writers that are still working in this renovation of telling stories to get fiction closer to the readers? conception of reality. If in the past causality models, which were formulated by science and philosophy, were applied as a way to mimesis reality by writers, could we find a model to unify this new understanding and increase verisimilitude in fiction, according with the new conception of reality that the readers have? Biographical note Amparo Seijo (Spain, 1973). Degree in Information Sciences (Complutense University). She has studied literature, creative writing and narratology. Since 2008, she is a teacher at Escuela de Escritores (www.escueladeescritores.com) in Creative Writing and Short Storytelling on Internet. She is also author of the course on narrative techniques for writing memoirs ?I confess that I lived?, and the Creative Lab ?How to Desterotype?. She collaborates occasionally with press specialized in Information Sciences and writes essay and short story. Daniel Soukup Reviving the dead white men (creative writing and literary history) Abstract One cliché which is prevalent in creative writing says that a good writer is, above all, a good reader. In fact, I believe that this is true; but to make the cliché pedagogically helpful, we need to ask more specific questions about the kind of reading which should be required from creative writing students. As an illustration, I will use our new European Literature course, which forms a part of our BA in Creative Writing. Biographical note Daniel Soukup (*1976) teaches European literature and English at the Literary Academy (Prague). He has published a volume of original poetry (2007), translations from the American poet Wallace Stevens (2008), translations of Anglo-Saxon riddles (2009), and numerous academic articles. His scholarly interests include various topics from Anglo- American and German literature, theory of alterity, 19th-century Czech literature, problems of translation, and creative writing theory. soukup@lit-akad.cz Cristina Vezzaro Being Creative in Literary Translation : A Practical Experience Abstract This contribution focuses on the implications of creative processes with respect to translation. Translation offers, indeed, a great ambiguity as far as creativity is concerned. This paper explores by means of practical examples and professional experiences how translators relate to the creative act that comes with translating. Being in touch with one?s inner self, recognizing that the translation process cannot be left untouched by one?s own imagery and being aware of the act of choice that comes with every written sentence can help translators find their own creative voices. The combination of an awareness that allows translators to listen and be respectful of the author?s style and a deep sense of one?s creative possibilities can lead to a comprehensive creative act that includes the author, the translator and the readers. Keywords: Choice?Creativity?Translation?Translation Process?Writing Biographical note Cristina Vezzaro graduated from the Ecole de Traduction et d?Interprétation in Geneva in 1994. She worked as a translator for the Swiss government and went back to Italy in 1995, where she started working as a free-lance translator. She started translating literature in 2005 and has translated several German and French novels and essays since then. She has also translated poetry and plays. In 2008 she started writing. She has an ongoing blog and one of her short-stories was recently selected in a writing contest and published. She has lately started exploring the relationship between creativity, writing and translating.