Here & Elsewhere: Place Writing with Paul Scraton and Marcel Krueger
Whether you are writing essays, blogs, a journal of your travels or the story that will become a novel, creating a strong sense of place is crucial. Suitable for anyone interested in turning the sights, sounds and soul of place into engaging prose, this workshop will explore place writing in all its facets and why through the wide world of literature, location matters.
Thanks to authors like W.G. Sebald, Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit, writing about place has moved from the confines of classic travel and history writing to become one of the most popular and dynamic genres in both contemporary non-fiction and novels with a strong emphasis on location. Involved and intelligent writing about place, whether from long-distance travellers, local topographers or edgeland explorers, has become known for its blending of styles – from reportage to memoir to folklore to fiction – enabling the reader to develop a deeper sense of the places being written about.
Over two days, participants will discover key works of place writing and learn about the different techniques to be found within this broad genre, including journalism, memoir and creative non-fiction accounts. Through a series of readings and exercises (which will include a ramble through the neighbourhood), participants will try a variety of fresh and creative approaches to writing about place and will work on a draft of a short piece of place writing – fiction or non-fiction – to be considered for publication on the Elsewhere: A Journal of Place blog.
To sign up to this workshop, email us at hello@thereaderberlin.com
Paul Scraton is a British-born writer and editor, based in Berlin. He is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of creative non-fiction books including Ghosts on the Shore: Journeys along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and The Idea of a River: Walking out of Berlin (Readux Books, 2015). Built on Sand is his debut work of fiction and will be published by Influx Press in 2019. This fragmented novel of place is a collection of stories from Berlin, interwoven personal geographies that together create a portrait of the city and its surroundings. On the Edge is creative non-fiction account of a series of walks around the edge of Berlin, currently being translated into German for publication in 2019.
Marcel Krueger is a German writer and translator living in Dundalk in Ireland and mainly writes about places, their history and the journeys in between. For Berlin – A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Tauris, 2016) he has provided new translations of such diverse German writers as Wolfgang Borchert and Jörg Fauser, and his articles and essays have been published in The Guardian, the Irish Times, Slow Travel Berlin and CNN Travel. Marcel also works as the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, and was a participant of the 2018 XBorders Accord project of the Irish Writer’s Centre and the Arts Council Northern Ireland. His latest book Babushka’s Journey – The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camp (I.B. Tauris, 2017) explores the wartime experiences of his grandmother Cilly through a travel memoir, and he is currently putting finishing touches to Iceland – A Literary Guide for Travellers, which will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019.
