Join us at THEMUSEUM to participate in a stream of consciousness writing workshop with writer, lecturer, dream interpreter, and PhD candidate, Elianne George El-Amyouni! Elianne will be using the writings of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady to lead participants through a current of creativity to experience the inner workings of stream of consciousness writing.
Cash bar and snacks will be available to assist in finding your creativity!
Event FAQWhat is Stream of Consciousness Writing?
Stream of Consciousness writing refers to a narrative style where the thoughts and emotions of a narrator or character are written out in a way that a reader can track the fluid mental state of the characters. This assists writers in providing a more intimate portrayal of their characters. This technique was used by many notable writers including Jack Kerouac.
When Kerouac published On the Road, not only did it spark the rise of a now wide-spread counterculture of free love, intoxication, and rejection of “the system”, but it also inspired a surge in the literary culture of “stream of conscious” writing. Kerouac didn’t come up with the style, which by the 1940s was already popular in the Western world, but was drawn to it by his muse, Neal Cassady.
While OTR is a masculine book, with its fair share of misogyny and narcissism expressed by the male characters, it nonetheless finds a place in our world as cultural artifact, as more myth than novel about the legendary Neal Cassady, a countercultural hero of the 20th century who would become a demigod and muse known for his complexity, dynamism, unbridled sexuality and capacity for intoxication.
Cassady’s effusive prose—which can be found in hundreds of letters and an unfinished manuscript—had that impulsive quality that Kerouac tries to emulate in OTR, and that we now associate with stream of consciousness writing.
Elianne is a writer, lecturer, dream interpreter, content creator, and PhD Candidate of English Literature at the University of Waterloo. She is a columnist for the Arabic magazines Rehla and Al Akhbar, has published poetry and short fiction in magazines such as The Temz Review and Litro UK, has self published a collection of reflections entitled Quickies, and written and directed two original plays.
Elianne’s online work can be found here: http://iamyouni.wordpress.com