CityTelling Festival is planned to take place on October 7–9, 2021 and it will be dedicated to home stories.

Since the early 2020s, our lives have changed abruptly. Life remained at HOME. The history took place at home. Home has become our refuge and the center of the universe.

Although we have lived separately for the past year, within the walls of our homes, this experience has become, as never before in history, a shared experience for all of humanity. Everyday testimonials on Facebook, Instagram stories, poems, songs, and memes that flooded social networks have become our shared diary. In that virtual reality, we together sought comfort and communion, followed each other’s lives between the four walls, and longed for the PRE-QUARANTINE world.

We invite writers to explore these common experiences and to create literary texts, inspired by them. Same as last year, we also invite you to revive “little” stories of Kaunasians, collected by Kaunas 2022. We keep them here: https://www.atmintiesvietos.lt/en/kaunas-2.

We hope that created literary texts will speak about today’s experiences from the perspective of the past stories.

Selected texts will appear in CityTelling Festival 2021 publications, on the websites of Kaunas 2022 (www.istorijufestivalis.eu and www.atmintiesvietos.lt) and we will reward authors with symbolic gift sets of Kaunas 2022.

We are waiting for unpublished texts of various genres in Lithuanian or English, with a total volume of 1,700–8,500 characters or 30–150 lines of poetry by August 9, 2021. Send it to [email protected] (Word or Pdf format).

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CityTelling Festival is organized by “Kaunas – European Capital of Culture 2022”, program Memory Office. Started in October 2019, the festival unites everyone who likes to tell stories and listen to them. The CityTelling Festival aims to remind the multiethnic memory of Kaunas and its surroundings, to strengthen the dialogue between different communities, to encourage pride in the place we live in, and at the same time – to talk about topics relevant to contemporary European.

See more: www.istorijufestivalis.eu/en

 

Contacts

Karina Židokaitė, [email protected]

 

Photo by Marc Wilson, 2019