This week, the Bohemian Writers Club features a selection of short stories recorded by Ostap Slyvynsky, a lecturer at the University of Lviv. They help us to get a sense, however remote and imperfect, of what the experience of war is like for ordinary people. Ostap and his colleagues collected these stories at Lviv railway station, at temporary shelters and at coffee stands in Lviv's streets when engaging those fleeing war further East in conversation.
https://www.bohemianwritersclub.org
The Bohemian Writers Club is an experiment in writing courageously, creatively, uncomfortably. It is also a space for story truths more than happening truths: stories designed to catch-and-release the firestorm that is our world - what it feels like to be caught up in something you don't control - as opposed to conventional fieldwork accounts of what happened at such and such a time in such and such a place. For stories judged not by accuracy but by their resonance. We want what David Foster Wallace wanted: "to author things that restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff." And it can be a space for intelligent polemics and behind the scenes confessionals on the experience of fieldwork and theorising. A space for the psychedelic and ruminative - beautifully rendered, always.
It is where we promise to write thoughtfully, candidly, experimentally about whatever it is which we have come into this world to say - and damn the consequences.
If you'd like to contribute a piece of writing, please drop me an email on: mejd3@cam.ac.uk
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Mark de Rond
Judge Business School, Cambridge U
Cambridge
+44 12 23 764135
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