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Creative Writing Class with Prof. Meretoja (University of Turku)

When

May 21, 2026 from 10:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)

Where

SR 109 (GCSC)

Contact Name

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This workshop demonstrates the Narrative Agency Reading and Writing Group Method, which Hanna Meretoja has developed in collaboration with her colleagues Päivi Kosonen and Eevastiina Kinnunen. Narrative agency refers to our ability to navigate our narrative environments: to use, (re)interpret, and engage with narratives that are culturally available to us, to analyze and challenge them, and to narratives we use and how we narrate our lives, relationships, and the world around us. The workshop aims at strengthening the narrative agency of the participants, enhancing their ability to engage with cultural narrative models in critical and creative ways. The workshop involves shared reading of narrative fiction, creative writing excersices, and reflection on the reading experiences and on the process of creative writing. The workshop is aimed at anyone interested in creative writing and/or reading groups.

 

// Prof. Dr. Hanna Meretoja  is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku (Finland). She runs the projects “Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency” (Research Council of Finland, 2023-2027) and “Narrative Agency Reading Group Model: Applications for Libraries, Schools and Hospitals” (Research Council of Finland, Proof of Concept, 2025-2026). She has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (2019-2020) and Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford (2019-2020, spring 2023), and she is member of Academia Europaea and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative studies, memory studies, and medical and health humanities. Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018, Oxford University Press) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), and she has co-edited The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics (2023, Oxford University Press), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020), Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (2018, Routledge), and the special issues of Memory Studies (“Cultural Memorial Forms”, 2021) and Poetics Today (“Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom”, 2022). She has also published a novel, Elotulet (2022, The Night of Ancient Lights, Die Nacht der alten Feuer, published in German in 2024).

 

 PLEASE, REGISTER HERE TO ATTEND!