Creative writing workshops

During the month of January 2024, Paquita Sanvicen and Joan Tahull offered a workshop on intergenerationality and creative writing to students from INS Segarra de Cervera and Col·legi Inmaculada de Tremp.

The title of the workshop was: "Qué xulo! Cuantas cosas sabes! Nos las contamos."

Workshop description: Every day, practically at all times, we are living together in spaces with people of different ages than ours. The main purpose of the workshop was to make adolescent students reflect on the benefits of interacting with people of different ages. Through a role-play activity and a creative narrative practice, participants reflected on their own knowledge, as well as the knowledge of their grandparents, and on the worlds they can build together when everything they have shared and continue to share emerges.

During the month of October of the 2024–2025 and 2025–26 academic years, Professor Núria Mina from the area of English Studies taught a creative writing workshop to the students of the course coordinated by Eva Barallat, 'End-of-Life Patient Care' (Atención al paciente al final de la vida) in the Nursing Degree and the Double Degree in Nursing and Physiotherapy at the University of Lleida.

The creative writing workshop had a twofold objective. On the one hand, to discuss intergenerational relationships and age-related stereotypes in contexts involving experiences connected with death. On the other, to provide Nursing and Physiotherapy students with narrative tools to help them write an end-of-life story.

The stories were assessed as part of the course and were later submitted to the Story Contest organized by the Associació Contra el Càncer Lleida.

The workshop consisted of three sessions of an hour and a half each.

• First session: The PRO-SUEDAD project was presented, there was a discussion about widowhood and intergenerational prejudices in Margaret Atwood’s short story “Widows,” and the creative tools “energy” and “images” were introduced.
• Second session: The following creative tools were explained: tension, pattern, subject knowledge, and structure. These were connected to Atwood’s “Widows,” and in the case of pattern, to Joan Margarit’s poem “Los Muertos”. 
• Third session: Participants were shown the usefulness of creating a story outline to organize their ideas; different techniques for creating characters were briefly discussed; and the importance of context and narrative voice, as well as narrative time and the modulation of dramatic action, was emphasized.

In each session, students were asked to complete creative writing exercises in order to practice the theory presented and gradually build their stories.

Teaching staff: Núria Mina and Eva Barallat

Follow-up action:

A scholarly article is currently being drafted on intergenerational interactions in the end-of-life stories written by the students who participated in the course, and a comparison with the finalist or winning stories from the Associació Contra el Càncer Lleida’s contest, whose authors did not receive the initial training on the need to question ageist stereotypes and to promote profigurative intergenerational societies based on mutual respect and care.