Velkommen to the Rewriting ‘Mouse as the Cat’s Tailor’ online workshop!

In order to participate you should be equipped with a laptop (or the like) as well as a timer. (Active time investment: approx. 45-60 minutes) 

1. Which word comes next? Be spontaneous!

This is a well-known associative warm-up exercise. In real-life workshops it takes a couple of minutes. To document the passing of time in our virtual time capsule, you can include the date and hour of your contribution in parenthesis behind your word. Also, please insert a running number with a colon in front of your contribution.

1: Texture (11.03.2021, 16:32 CET)

2. Point your finger at a random word above. Starting with that word, type away in your preferred language for fifteen minutes without self-censorship. Ready? Go!

Please type your text instead of writing by hand, as you will need a typed script for the next step. Whenever the flow of your writing runs the risk of coming to a halt, continue with whatever word comes into your mind. Trust your unconscious to guide your writing (just like the French surrealists did a hundred years ago)!

3. Let’s listen to your texture – in a language different from the language in which you wrote it!

If you don’t already have a reading tool in your word processing program, you can use your MS browser instead. Just make a PDF of your text and open it in Edge: The icon for text-to-speech is in the middle of the top bar. Once you have clicked on it, you can find a number of languages under ‘Options’ in the upper right-hand corner.

Should you prefer – here is how to use MS “Read Aloud in Word 365 and 2019 in depth”: https://tinyurl.com/j5ttpkmz

And here is “How to Use Text to Speech on a Mac for World Languages”: https://tinyurl.com/bu9zfnf9

4. While listening, pay attention to any words that evoke associations or seem somehow meaningful to you!

Pause the reading tool to note down all the expressions that catch your attention. Repeat the exercise for all the languages you wish to experiment with. You can even select languages that are unknown to you since phonetic associations may transcend language-specific semantic ones.

Feel free to laugh when the half-human reading robot says something funny. Simultaneously, stay concentrated when the bilingual tongue twisters call for your attention.

5. Are there any words or expressions among the above that (possibly) relate to your artistic (writing) practice? Please insert them here:

Please start a new line for each word pair and include your number from the warm-up exercise (=s. ‘1.’ above) together with a running letter.

Here’s how to note your observations (if needed, cf. the concrete examples below for more clarity):

Your number and the running letter: Original expression originating from your 15-min. text (its language, ‘English translation of the word’) => the spoken expression such as you perceived it (language of the text-to-speech tool, ‘English translation of the word’) => your possible further associations (language/s, ‘English translation of the word’).

In your English translations you can choose to use either the contextual connotation of the word in your text or all its relevant meanings.

1a: fabuliert (German, ‘fabulate’) => fab-you-layered (English) 

1b: Stück (German, ‘bit’ / ‘play’) => stuck (English)

1c: Bearbeitung (German, ‘editing’) => beer-by-tongue (English)

1d: muss (German, must) => [maˑs] (English, French) => Maß (German with a slightly foreign accent, ‘extent’)

1e: (w/z)ittert (German, ‘suspects/trembles’) => W/Z itère (French, ‘W/Z iterates’)

1f: Spricht (German, ‘talks’) => [spritst] (Finnish) => spritzt (German, ‘squirts’)

1g: Lösung (German, ‘solution’) => [losuŋ] (Italian) => ‘Losung’ (German, ‘watchword’)

1h: Touché (French loanword) => души (Russian, ‘souls’)

1i: Ego (German, ‘ego’) => его (Russian, ‘his’ / masculine pronoun singular, possessive case)

6. How do the words listed above help you expand or think differently about your artistic (writing) practice?

Please use your identification number (=from exercises 1. and 5.) so that others can connect your thoughts with the right examples!

1: As outlined in my conference abstract, I had planned to initiate the discussion in the workshop with illustrative examples from my texts (column, fairy tale, literary prose). In this online version of my workshop, I used them as basis for the spoken translations.

Especially the American English versions of this German multi-genre texture brought in a lightness that I hope will stick in my memory – as a subversive means of the mouse that fails to tailor according to the exigencies of the cat (personifying one’s own inner critic, academic conventions, discursive trends in artistic research etc.).

Overall, I saw the creative power of multilingual thinking materialize itself in the random interlingual puns. The associative spaces emerging at the crossroads of various languages triggered a mental cinema in me that I not only found liberating from the above production aesthetic point of view but that also made me feel the urge to start writing further texts based on these expressions (similarly to the 15-min. exercise). For the moment, I prefer to leave my examples without further comment – with the rhetorical question in the back of my head: ‘I wonder if similar stories start unfolding themselves in the brains of others as they read the plain examples.’

I would like to close (for now) with a statement of the author Max Frisch describing his writing impetus – which seems all the more relevant to me in the current situation: “You long to know whether you are different from everyone else.” (Frisch, Max 2008. Schwarzes Quadrat. Zwei Poetikvorlesungen. Herausgegeben von Daniel de Vin unter Mitarbeit von Walter Obschlager. Mit einem Nachwort von Peter Bichsel Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, translation E.M.) 

7. Here you can share more personal comments:

Below, you can include observations and feelings about your online writing workshop experience. Also, feel free to share your name and field if you wish!

1: Somewhat contrary to the absence of real travelling during the past year, I have found my way back to multilingual writing experiments – which seem to establish themselves as the leitmotif of my literary research practice. Absent in my initial abstract, the multilingual aspect is the central difference to the originally conceived workshop.

The motivation to participate on the relic website with this ‘taster version’ of the initial concept was my curiosity to see what happens to an interactive writing workshop when the context changes from a synchronous and analogous gathering to an asynchronous, digital environment.

Presenting the workshop in this manner feels like shouting into a void. However, ‘even in the vacuum there is some energy’^*). I am grateful for every single contributor who feels the desire to reclaim the hybrid writing space, in which idioms cross-fertilize – thereby symbolically transcending the national barriers currently being erected to ‘shield’ us from the Other.

- Elina Mikkilä (free literary researcher)

^*) Astrophysicist Matthias Steinmetz in: Cantzen, Rolf 2014. Was übrig bleibt, wenn nix übrig bleibt – Über das Nichts In: Freistil Deutschlandfunk. Manuscript of the radio broadcast 24.08 https://tinyurl.com/4dutzhxn, p. 6