We regret the passing, on April 11, 2024, of the distinguished Romanian author and critic Dan Cristea, who served as the editor in chief of the Luceafărul de Dimineață cultural monthly. In addition to being an alum of the 1985 Fall Residency, Cristea received his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.
"Creative writing workshops are new for us in the Arab world. So is this book. For the first time, Lebanese and Arab writers bring to light secrets of their craft and talk about details and backgrounds of their creative experiences. Usually writers create, while leaving others to search for the art hidden in their work. This book asks the writers themselves to explain their art. In doing so, they teach the art of creative writing and reveal the secrets of creativity. A text written by a writer about his or her creative writing is “creativity” itself in a different way. Reading writers’ texts about their writings helps to know them better as writers and also as people. In this way we meet them as people, after we met them as 'books'.
"This book is a result of the experiences of seven writers (two poets and five novelists) who themselves volunteered to lead us through the methods of their work and to the ways of creating literature in general."
--back cover text of Kitabat alkitabah (Writers on Writing), translated from the Arabic by Iman Humaydan
The following essays from Kitabat alkitabah (Beirut: ARRAWI Publishing, 2010) are presented below. For information on how to purchase the book, e-mail alrawi2012[at]gmail.com.
- Mohamad Abi Samra, "Narrating the Infrastructure of Stigmatized Characters" English Arabic
- Youssef Bazzi, "The Styles of Language" English Arabic
- Abbass Beydoun, "Representing the Unknown" English Arabic
- Iman Humaydan, "The First Sentence" English Arabic
- Alawiyya Sobh, "Character-Driven" English Arabic
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