Writing about yourself - 10 writing sessions Yearly Course

Every Wednesday, from 02 May to 04 July.

Have you always wanted to write about your life, about yourself? In this workshop, you will find all the techniques to start your "book"!

In a Parisian writing school, take advantage of 10 weekly sessions to learn to write about yourself.

We sometimes forget that it took a very long time for a literature of the self to take hold. To say "I" was obscene, anti-universal, against God.

With modernity and the birth of the individual, and more recently with the multiplication of personal speech, through blogs and social networks, a certain discrepancy has arisen.with modernity and the birth of the individual, and more recently with the multiplication of personal speech through blogs and social networks, a certain discredit has been cast on the genre of autobiography, as if to speak of oneself were to exclude oneself from an understanding of the world.

Can we still talk about ourselves?

This workshop aims to review the history of a genre in order to better understand its nuances, modes of expression and current events. It will also enable the participants to learn different writing techniques to make an autobiographical project a reality by working on different compulsory passages: self-portraiture, recalling a memory, revealing a secret, self-analysis, setting up the autobiographical pact and breaking it, the autofictional game. But above all, this workshop will seek to help everyone know where to start.

Your writer-teacher:

Gilles Sebhan is a writer and teacher in a high school in the Paris region. His first four novels are largely autobiographical and, according to René de Ceccatty, "violent and erotic, quite provocative, but they reflect a real reflection on sexuality, on crime, on generations" (Le Monde). In 2006, he published La Dette (Gallimard), a story in which he examines his father, who wore a yellow star during the Occupation and took part in the Algerian War in the French army.

Gilles Sebhan also writes biographical stories about writers. In 2010, he chose to pay tribute to the writer Tony Duvert, who was celebrated in the 1970s before falling into silence and isolation (Tony Duvert, l'enfant silencieux, Denoël). He evokes this figure again in 2015 in a second book, Retour à Duvert, (Le Dilettante), which was highly acclaimed by the critics and selected for the Renaudot, Médicis and Prix Décembre lists.

In January 2018, Gilles Sebhan made his first foray into the noir novel with Cirque mort, l'histoire d'un enfant disparu (Le Rouergue / Actes Sud).

Every Wednesday, from 02 May to 04 July.

• Entry ticket