Writing Workshop: Surrealism

Nonsense, Surrealism, and the Feel of Meaning

Picasso spent his entire life trying to paint like a child again. Writers do the same thing, they spend years learning the rules, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to forget them. This workshop is an invitation to skip straight to the forgetting.

Nonsense is not the absence of meaning. It is meaning arriving through a different door (sound, rhythm, the ‘wrong detail’). Lewis Carroll invented words with no definitions and (most) readers understood them immediately (or never). Edward Lear wrote stories that mostly made sense, and then stitched one absurd thing into them. The surrealists went further inward, they wrote without thinking and found things they could never have planned, because the unconscious has its own logic, stranger and more honest than anything the rational mind produces on purpose.

This workshop exists because somewhere between learning to write and learning to write well, most of us lost access to the part of language that is alive, strange, and slightly out of control. This is an attempt to get it back.

The Experience

We are meaning-making animals. We cannot help it, we take everything that happens to us and immediately turn it into a story, a lesson, a reason—symbol, symbol, symbol!

In three hours, we write with our eyes closed, we hum before we pick up the pen, we invent words for things that have no name, we write stories that go wrong on purpose and stay wrong.

Children do not write to mean something. We are trying to get back there.

To remember what it felt like to do something just to do it. Before the right answer. Before the grade. Before the voice that asks whether any of this is any good.

Three short freewrites open doors between the exercises. We end with a long freewrite and a reading circle.

Nothing needs to make sense.

This Experience Is Designed For

🌀 Writers who feel too much in their own heads

🌀 Anyone who has been told, or has told themselves — that they are not creative

🌀 Poets and experimental writers looking for new ways in

🌀 People who take language seriously enough to let it go completely

🌀 People who are curious about what lies beyond meaning

🌀 Anyone willing to be surprised by their own hand

Location of the event:

Fable Bookshop Cafe, Rua dos Prazeres 10A, Lisbon, 1200-820

About the Venue: Fable

Fable is an English bookshop, cafe, and creative events space in Lisbon. We offer wholesome meals, specialty coffee, natural wine, and a thoughtfully curated selection of both fiction and non-fiction books. We also host a medley of events and workshops focused on creativity, wellness, book and music launch parties, and inclusive community gatherings.

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