OuLiPo: a Creative Literary Method

A podcast conversation with Terry Freedman from Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life

Welcome! If you’re new here, I’m Kathleen Waller and this is my newsletter about cultural studies, the arts, and writing. I have a related podcast, which is the focus of today’s post.

Today, I’m speaking with Terry Freedman about Oulipo and experimentation with writing, which are both part of a new thread on Terry’s Substack publication called Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life. He will also be offering a workshop on this topic next month.

We had a really fun chat about Oulipo, writing styles, and teaching methods. Hope you enjoy it! Read below for all the links and further information.

Terry Freedman (photo via the writer)

Terry has spent his career in education, first as a teacher of Economics, then as a teacher of Computing, followed by spells in a government body, local authority and independent consultancy. He’s been a freelance writer in the field of education since 1989, and also writes about education, literature, writing and anything else that takes his fancy.

What is OuLiPo? According to Poetry Foundation, it is:

An acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), a group of writers and mathematicians formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. Unlike the Dada and surrealist movements, OuLiPo rejects spontaneous chance and the subconscious as sources of literary creativity. Instead, the group emphasizes systematic, self-restricting means of making texts. For example, the technique known as n + 7 replaces every noun in an existing text with the noun that follows seven entries after it in the dictionary. Notable members of this group include the novelists George Perec and Italo Calvino, poet Oskar Pastior, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

But you can also hear Terry’s own take on it in the podcast. I’ve really been enjoying Terry’s prolific newsletter with many ideas about the writing process as well as fiction, tips, and letters.

Below is the podcast recording (this link to other platforms as well) and a couple of Terry’s free articles:

Experiments in style index

Oulipo writing prompts

• What is Oulipo? Via Poetry Foundation 

• Workshop link: https://www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/writing-the-oulipo-a-taster

• The Guardian on Oulipo

• Origins of Experiments in Style on Terry Freedman’s newsletter: Eclectecism: Reflections on literature and life 

• Further examples 

Many thanks to Terry for joining me as a guest on the podcast! Let us know what you think here about the ideas in our conversation.