The title of my workshop makes reference to a Finnish folk tale: the story of a mouse that sets out to tailor a costume for a cat and repeatedly fails to deliver whatever piece of clothing is asked of it. Despite the ever-decreasing amount of fabric, the mouse keeps on promising a successful, yet more modest outcome. As there is virtually nothing left of the original fabric, the cat loses its patience and eats the mouse. “Since then cat and mouse have been enemies.”
As I started experimenting, almost a decade ago, with a style of writing that I later came to call ‘literature-based research’, I had to find my own references of how to do so. To my left there was a stack of spontaneous attempts piling up, to the right those that followed existing patterns – just like the mouse prefers to mess things up a bit to explore the unfamiliar.
The French poststructuralist concepts of literary texts as «tissus» seem to provide the appropriate fabric for mice wanting to tailor for discursively correct cats. A wholly different poetological concept derives from the attempt to develop literary writing into an artistic research practice in the context of the present-day literary scene. In the workshop, my texts of such hybrid origin deliver the starting point for correlated exercises of 'undirected writing' likely to develop a logic of their own, thereby amalgamating traditionally remote writing practices.
We will begin the workshop with a collective association exercise, which will provide the fabric for a brief « écriture automatique » session. The subsequent exchange involves a textual analysis during which the participants share their writing experience, using concrete examples from their texts. Thanks to the resulting interdisciplinary exchange – guided by my writing practice and theoretical reflections in the emerging field of literature-based research – the close reading of one’s own stream of consciousness evolves into an on-going semiosis (à la Derrida's «différAnce»).

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