Two creative writing courses for all levels of learners. ​

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How can life experiences become powerful fiction? What’s the voice that should tell your tale? Which facts need to be changed to make justice to the raw emotions underneath your story?

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ECA working in collaboration with HFA presents two separate Creative Writing Workshops, taught by Guleraana Mir and hosted by Hackney Fine Arts.

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About the masterclass

​During three hours you will experience some of our best games, exercises and tools for unleashing your creativity and having fun with strangers. Writing is a physical beast that only when given free rein will lead you to your artistic voice, or at least take you for an adventurous ride!​ You will only need a pen, a notebook and to follow closely our only rule: just keep writing.

 

​Our own lives are a bottomless -and, perhaps, unavoidable- well of inspiration for writing fiction. With the right craftsmanship, tools and tricks, we can bring the dramatic relevance out of a personal experience and make it flourish into a tale of its own that connects with the universal topics of literature.

 

​A creative experience directed at any person who would like to get lost amid words for three hours and turn their personal experiences into stories. Writing is a physical beast that can run freely as soon as we let go of its reins - our fear of shame and inadequateness. And if we nudge it down the paths of improvisation, playfulness and childlike exploration, it might lead us to find our own artistic voice - or at least enjoy the adventure!

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You will experience our best exercises, games and techniques for creative writing, while filling out pages until your hands shake. You will also be introduced to some of our tenets about creativity, art and the family as a ripe topic for artistic exploration. All of this will happen among strangers, who perhaps might turn friends after sharing your rawest drafts, if you dare to read them out in our closing open mic.

You will only need a pen, an empty notebook and the urge to fill it.

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About eca (El Cuaderno Azul)

Traditional workshops conceive writing as an extension of reading a literary canon. Thus, they focus on editing drafts, applying a set of predefined rules for ‘good literature’ and leave the creative process as an impenetrable black box.

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El Cuaderno Azul is an atypical school. We believe that writing is, first and foremost, a game that anyone can play, where no rule is sacred except this one: just keep writing. This game can be enjoyed for an hour or a lifetime, alone, among friends or strangers. It can bring laughs, tears, arousal or revelations. And, if played hard and long enough, it can lead to artistic discovery and personal transformation.

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We have tested this belief throughout 10 years of trajectory. From a tiny gathering of humans huddled in a living room in the neighborhood of San Telmo, we have grown into the largest creative writing school of Argentina and Uruguay, with around 300 students attending regular groups, both virtual and in person throughout 4 cities. Our students have won contests and been published in major publishers as well as literary magazines.

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El Cuaderno Azul is also an online bookstore and publisher, specialized in recovering works that flew under the radar or got lost in the market’s hunger for novelty, but we think deserve a second chance in the literary scene.

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About your tutor Guleraana Mir

​Guleraana Mir is an award-winning writer, theatre maker and one half of The Thelmas, a female-led theatre company devoted to redressing the equality imbalance in the arts. She is passionate about telling authentic stories that celebrate not stereotype, and speak to complex social realities in a fresh and disruptive way.

She specialises in developing new work through devising and writing with young people and community groups, and leads writing programmes for artists of all ages at a number of institutions including National Theatre and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

She is currently working on her first mainstage play, and has an original TV series in development with afshan d’souza-lodhi.

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About ECA'S founder, Juan Sklar

Buenos Aires, 1983. Writer, teacher, screenwriter and radio columnist. Conducted the program Cartas al hijo (Vorterix) and Ideologías animadas (Metro), both turned later into the essay books of the same name. His work has been published in several editions of the literary magazine Orsai. Wrote Los catorce cuadernos (2014), Nunca llegamos a la India (2018) and Garche (2021). Founded El Cuaderno Azul in 2013.

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