What was the Creative Writing Subcommittee?

The folder that we gathered for the Who is Who looks great, with a lot of pictures, texts, sketches and videos. I am very impatient that you can all see it. In the meantime, here is the text that I wrote as an introduction to the folder (with Monica's part published in the backstage journal).

Photos will come next... Don't forget to publish your texts on the blog!

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Monica Westeren described the Creative Writing Subcommittee a few weeks after its creation in these terms:

"The subcommittee for creative writing was formed on a buzzing night in an Irish pub near Schuman: a bunch of Commission stagiaires, looking for their lost creativity amidst EU Directives and Regulations; speaking points and briefing notes.
We share at least one passion: Literature. (And perhaps even another: Finnish chocolate, judging by the big turnout of people at the first meeting, after being promised a piece of the brown gold).
The first theme to write on was "intercultural miscommunication" – an area where we are all experts. Living in at least a couple of EU countries gives you a taste for the vastly different behaviour across the borders. Whether it is about eating manners, time management or ability to speak to strangers, at some point you are bound to run into difficulties. We saw these misunderstandings as a great source of inspiration, and decided to let our imagination run wild…"

It has now been five months filled with creative meetings, picnics and drinks. We gathered every Tuesday night around a glass of wine to let our creativity flow. Each reunion brought different themes and writing styles to learn from. The first meetings were attentively planned, with texts to read and themes to write on. Yet progressively, we all found our own directions and our own ways to express ourselves through words on paper – or with the help of sketches or a guitar.

As for my own experience, the spark of inspiration arrived at the first meeting. Sharing my passion for writing was something new to me. So far, my only audience had been friends and family, none of them being able to give me a feedback from a writer's perspective. On that day, Sahar was reading a dialogue with no title, which was later called "a clash of generation". I arrived home at midnight, sat down and wrote until three. It had been six years since I last touched a pen. Looking back, I am surprised I have managed to live without it. Forgotten sensations came back at once: the chill of expressing the inexpressible, of gathering a cluster of words into something meaningful. Going back to writing was like being reunited with a childhood friend.
Each of us had unique ways to tell things. Monica, the founder of the group, focused mostly on gender difference, a topic which was brought to a new light with David's male point of view. Edina, our writeaholic and cofounder of the Committee, wrote pages of powerful stories with a poetic touch; equally poetic were Ruth's short stories and Marcin's longer novels. Erna's and Sahar's texts were more vivid, based on dialogues at first, then slowly developing towards a greater introspection. Then there were John's creative pieces, on paper yet rarely as a prose: poems, sketches, songs, in whichever direction his inspiration drove him.
It was a great bunch of inspired people, and for sure an exclusive experience. We turned out to prove that creative writing could cross boundaries and languages, to form a sort of "intercultural communication", as to prove our first theme wrong.