ABOUT SLS ITALY

From the Founding Director | Board of Directors | Key Officers and Employees | Co-Directors | FAQ

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      The Summer Literary Seminar programs are premised on the idea that one's writing can and does often benefit considerably from the keen sense of temporary displacement created by an immersion in a thoroughly foreign culture and street vernacular; that one's voluntarily removing oneself from the routine context of one's life tends to provide for a strong creative jolt and offer a wholly new perspective on one's writing – indeed, a new angle of viewing the customary and the mundane. SLS is about being lost in the sheer foreignness of one's temporary surroundings, in the company of like-minded and creative fellow-writers – being lost, in other words, in a findable context. Another foundational notion for us is one of the essential commonality of writerly experiences and outlook on the world, across the languages and cultures. We believe that writers, regardless of their origins in the world, have more in common with each other than, frequently, their compatriots and fellow native speakers. Without this article of faith on our part, SLS woud not have come into existence.

SLS Italy will be the first addition to our roster of programs in years, representing the broadening of the scope of our offerings, as we gradually begin to implement the idea of establishing a series of SLS programs in different parts of the world. These programs will all be premised on our belief in the commonality of writerly experience, thereby creating a larger and single literary space. Discover more about the SLS Italy Program and Italy FAQ.

SLS began in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1998. Over the years and in one of the world's strangest, most fascinating, and most literary cities, we've prided ourselves on bringing together with their Russian counterparts, the finest American, Canadian, European, and African writers and literary scholars in a two- and four-week flurry of intellecutally stimulating activities.

In 2001, SLS launched its new, sister program: SLS Kenya. For a few years, because of the difficult local and global circumstances, the program had to be postponed or kept down in size. In 2005, we held our first large-scale program in Kenya, hosting a dozen faculty members and nearly fifty North American and East African participants. We now organize the program annually, using the capital of Nairobi and the ineffable medieval stone town of Lamu as our primary locations.

Our primary affiliation is with Concordia Univeristy in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. SLS also is affiliated, in St. Petersburg, with the venerable Herzen University – and in Kenya, with the remarkably dynamic and innovative Kwani? literary trust and journal (www.kwani.org). We are partners with the largest-circulation Canadian general-interest magazine, The Walrus, which publishes the work by the winners of our annual prose and poetry contest – one of the largest contests in North America.

In the past, SLS has also worked with the online anthology Russianpoetry.net; the literary publisher Dalkey Archive Press; the literary journal Fence; and Tin House magazine.

Visit our Friends and Affiliates section on our Links page for more information.

From the SLS Founding Director

          SLS Italy is the first program being added to our two mainstays, Russia and Kenya, as we set out, ever so circumspectly (we hope), to realize the idea which we have been contemplating for awhile now: that of a limited multiplicity of similarly structured, discrete literary conferences taking place in different parts of the world. All of those programs will be premised on our fundamental belief in the essential commonality of writerly experience everywhere, all across the spectrum of languages and cultures. What we hope to accomplish here is to start forming thereby a joint, equally notional yet still quite real, single literary space: SLS-SLS.

This is where we start – to continue.

It is a good place to start, too – and not merely because of the fact that if one's original system of literary coordinates, however abstract perhaps, is anchored in Russia and foregrounded in North America, then no literary tradition is more perfectly equidistant both from the former and the latter, so to speak, than the Italian one, so from a purely conceptual standpoint, it would be difficult for us to find a more logical place to go next. On a practical level, too, SLS-Italy represents a paradigm we'd like to follow and replicate going forward: two writers living in two different countries, on two non-contiguous continents, deciding, on the basis of their shared love of and deep personal connections with Italy and its literature and culture, to join forces in an effort to set up a new SLS program.

Indeed, that's exactly what we'd like and hope to see happening, time and again, in the months and years to come, in other places, too. Here we start – at the beginning, as ever. Onwards to Italy. It's genuinely exciting, this new and uncertain undertaking

 

Please contact the program for further information.


* Summer Literary Seminars is a charitable, Non-Profit corporation as organized under section 501(c)3 of the IRS tax code. Our Tax ID is 57-1179618; our exemption determination letter is kept on file and copies are available upon request.



The SLS Italy Seminar is sponsored in part by: