Translingual Creative Writing

Students of Utrecht University: UU students are welcome to join the workshops for free. E-mail Mia You (m.m.you@uu.nl) to register.

In these workshops, participants are invited to write creatively across different languages. We use the term “translingual” here to emphasize that languages are always defined and used in relation to each other; even when a writer appears to employ only one language, other languages will inevitably influence how and why she uses that language. Therefore, whether they ultimately choose to write in Dutch, English, both, other, or many languages, participants are asked to consider how their writing practice can rise up to the challenges and inspirations posed by their multilingual lives.  

Each workshop will feature a writer in conversation with a university researcher in language or literature. The speakers will share some of their work and discuss their own multilingual/translingual practice, and then they will offer participants exploratory writing exercises. After a brief writing session, participants will get the opportunity to share and discuss their own work. 

This creative writing series is co-organized and funded by the NWO-Veni Project ‘Poetry in the Age of Global English,’ led by Mia You (Utrecht University).

Note on language: The presentations and discussions will be in English, but participants are welcome to write in and between any languages they would prefer. 

Workshop #4 Writing Home, Writing Shelter

In this workshop, Holly Pester and Yael van der Wouden will consider the home as a motif in their recent work and lead participants in exploring writing as an exercise in seeking sheltering. What language(s) do we associate with our sense of home, and what language(s) would be used in the shelter we construct? How does writing emerge from and help shape our sense of belonging to particular spaces? Through discussion and writing exercises, participants will experiment with literary and poetic structure as architecture.

Holly Pester is a poet and writer, and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing in the department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. She has worked in sound art and performance, with BBC Radio, Women’s Art Library and Wellcome Collection. Her publications include Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip (Book Works, 2015), Comic Timing (Granta Poetry, 2021) and The Lodgers (Granta, 2024) a novel that experimentally explores tenancy, troubled notions of home and motherhood.

Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher living in Utrecht, The Netherlands. She's lectured in Comparative Literature & Creative Writing at Maastricht University and Utrecht University. Her first novel, The Safekeep, will be published in May 2024. 

Past workshops

Workshop #3: The Agency of Breath (22 march, 15:00-17:00)

In this workshop, we will consider how breath is shaped by and can shape language. What is in the air around us? How does it nourish us, and how does it suffocate us? What traces does it leave in our words? In exploring the relationship between breath and language, we will also experiment with how writing and performance can be enfolded into each other.

About the speakers:

S*an D. Henry-Smith lives and works in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include “tremor low” at ROZENSTRAAT in Amsterdam (2023) and “in awe of geometry & mornings” at White Columns in New York (2021). Their poetry collection Wild Peach (2020) was shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and they are the author of two chapbooks: Body Text (2016) and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System (2019). They have received awards and fellowships from Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst (2023), the Fulbright Program (2020), The Poetry Project (2019), and Poets House (2017), among others. They have read and performed previously at 47 Canal, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Shed, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, The Poetry Project, and Triple Canopy, among others. Henry-Smith regularly collaborates in sound, poetry, and performance with Dweller Electronics, Imani Elizabeth Jackson as Mouthfeel, Ryan C. Clarke, Danny Sadiel Peña, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, and Derica Shields, among others.

Magdalena Górska is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University. Her research focuses on feminist politics of breathing and vulnerability. She is the author of Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability (2016), co-editor of the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing book series, and founder of the Breathing Matters Network. 

Workshop #2: Queer Code-switching (19 January, 15-17:00)

In this workshop, poet/critic Obe Alkema and linguistics researcher Hielke Vriesendorp will discuss how code-switching could be regarded as an “identity practice” in creative writing — a mode of using alternative languages, particularly Internet English, within the context of a dominant local language to signal resistance to the normative local culture and to define one’s identity within one’s own peculiar, personal, performative terms. 

About the speakers:

Obe Alkema (1993) werkt bij Uitgeverij AnkhHermes, schrijft over poëzie voor NRC Handelsblad, publiceert in/op diverse Nederlandse/internationale tijdschriften/platforms en bereidt het eerste deel van zijn memoires voor. // Obe Alkema (1993) works at Uitgeverij AnkhHermes, writes about poetry for NRC Handelsblad, publishes in/on various Dutch/international magazines/platforms and is preparing the first part of his memoirs.

Hielke Vriesendorp is a linguist at Utrecht University and Fryske Akademy working (amongst other things) on the way queer speakers use language variation to position themselves in the social landscape - for example by inserting English into their Nederlands.

Workshop #1: Translation as Creative Inspiration (24 November, 15-17:00)

In this workshop, Dong Li and Mia You will discuss how the practice of translation can influence and shape one’s own creative writing.

About the speakers:

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from the Chinese, English, French, and German. Born and raised in China, he was educated at Deep Springs College and Brown University. His full-length English translations from the Chinese include Song Lin’s The Gleaner Song (Giramondo & Deep Vellum, 2021) and Zhu Zhu’s The Wild Great Wall (Deep Vellum, 2018). He has received fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo and Humboldt Foundations, MacDowell, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, Yaddo, and others. His debut poetry collection The Orange Tree (The University of Chicago Press, 2023) was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

Mia You is an assistant professor in the English Language and Culture program at Utrecht University and a writing tutor in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute. Her current research project, ‘Poetry in the Age of Global English,’ is funded by an NWO-Veni grant. She is the author of the poetry collection I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press), and her forthcoming collection Festival will be published simultaneously in English (Belladonna Collaborative) and Dutch (Uitgeverij Chaos/Das Mag). 

Save the upcoming dates:
– January 19
– March 22
– May 24

Costs:

General: 15 euros per session

Students of Utrecht University: UU students are welcome to join the workshops for free. E-mail Mia You (m.m.you@uu.nl) to register.