Masterclass on Writing with Rachel Cusk

In this intimate session, Cusk invites participants to reflect on the artist’s relationship to family, freedom, and truth. Drawing from her ongoing project in Athens, which reimagines auto-fiction through performance and self-representation, the author challenges the myth of the solitary creator, suggesting that familial bonds—whether nurturing or restrictive—may be the very crucible in which artistic individuality is forged.

For her, the concept of freedom is central to the public idea of what an artist is. "This sense of freedom resides in the artist’s individuality as much as in his or her creativity. The artist, being individual or having attained individuality, seems unbound by societal or familial relationships. This way, (s)he exists in correspondence with the part of ourselves that wishes to tell the truth, but because of those same relationships is unable to. Yet is the artist’s own truth-telling in fact the direct result of belonging or having belonged to a family? Does the family’s encouragement or prohibition of creativity form the basis of what kind of artist he or she is?”