There are people “who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication.” -- Lawrence Durrell
Greece is our ancestral home– we were born to its sun, sea, and islands – to its penchant for speculation, exploration, philosophy, and myth – its relentless searching for the essence of things, and its celebration of the mind, body, and senses. The great Greek myths probe the depths of our psyche to reveal the conflicts and energies that fuel our lives. Greece is a storied territory. As Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor once claimed, you cannot walk across its terrain without tripping over some sacred spot drenched in history or myth. Each of its six thousand islands is a world unto itself.
Places inhabit us just as we inhabit them. They have personality, emotions, agency, and transformative powers. This is particularly true of Greece and its islands.
Islomania was the underlying theme of a recent writing workshop I taught at the Aegean Arts Circle Workshops on the island of Andros.
During our sessions, we explored islands and their meaning. Geographical islands and psychological ones. Islands as setting, protagonist, myth, and metaphor. The enormous gap between the popular image of islands as places of pleasure, escape, the natural life, and utopia and the bleaker,cruder reality they often are. We explored “islomania” and insularity and what these things have meant in our lives and work. In addition to working with The Soul of Place – A Creative Writing Workbook, we elaborated several exercises with island themes to use during the workshop.
1.Write about water as a medium, an element, as distance, emotion, music, or as part of your body.
2. Write about an island in your life, interpreting “island” from any point of view desired.
3. Connect the islands in your life in a personal essay.
4.Write about collecting islands or a collector of islands.
5. Make a deep map of the islands in your life or of your ideal island.
6. Write about an island creature, from any domain – including imaginary, mythological,or culinary! Or write about a (sea) food as a form of alien life.
7. Write about a culinary experience as a rite of passage. (See MFK Fisher on the oyster).
8. Write about a house or room from which you are(or the main occupant is) absent.
9. Write about an object that transports you to another time or place.
10. Open the door to a place you once loved, but haven’t been for awhile…
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