Cities Lauren Elkin - Writing Workshop

We are all influenced by the places we live in, write in, visit. How can we become more attuned to the way place shapes our lives? How do we write place, and what’s at stake when we do? Georges Perec’s attempt to catalogue, or “exhaust,” everything happening in the Place Saint Sulpice on a series of days in Paris in 1974, helps us understand how the way we see the world depends on where we’re sitting within it; it’s impossible to notice everything. What do we see when we look at the world? What kind of world do we create when we attempt to write it? Participants will read excerpts from An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, play Perec-inspired writing games, and will have the chance to write about places both real and imaginary, of the present and the past, and, perhaps, the future. As part of CCA's cities ongoing programme and in collaboration with writer Laura Edbrook.

Lauren Elkin is the author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (Chatto & Windus), and the co-author, with Scott Esposito, of The End of Oulipo? (Zer0 Books). She is also the co-translator of Claude Arnaud's Jean Cocteau: a Life (with Charlotte Mandell, Yale UP), recently long-listed for a PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and is currently translating Michelle Perrot's Histoire de chambres, also for Yale. Her essays and criticism have appeared in, among others, The Guardian, The New York Times, frieze, the FT, and The White Review, where she is a contributing editor. She is a lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, where she also co-directs the Centre for New and International Writing. Originally from New York, she lives between Liverpool and Paris.