Unwritten Letters

« If you’ve ever wanted to write a letter to someone but never did, because you didn’t dare, didn’t know, couldn’t or didn’t manage to go through with it, tell me about it and I’ll write it for you.
We’ll spend 35 minutes together, during which you’ll tell me about this unwritten letter. I’ll then spend 45 minutes writing it for you. Once the letter is written, I’ll read it to you.
If you’re happy with it, you can keep it (in whatever form), and if not, I’ll delete it and leave no trace of it. Finally, if it suits you and you agree, I may do something with it in the theatre, on the understanding that all the letters will be made anonymous. »

That was the premise on which I started. The Unwritten Letters project has continued ever since, city after city. The writing sessions always take place over the course of a day, and then in the early evening we work with part of the Lieux-Dits company team to prepare a theatrical form based on these letters. A dozen or so letters are read each evening, and we mix the letters of the day with those from other towns, adding letters from Paris to Orléans, from Arles to Saintes, from Toulouse to New York, from New York to Lorient and from Lorient to Duclair.

It’s a deliberately short, rapid, incomplete form of creation, built up in a few hours. To say, among other things, that theatres can welcome this too, the chance to come and talk, to have something written for you, to get along with you in the world.

I’m now inviting other authors to write in some of the places we go. Julie Ménard, Alice Zeniter, Samuel Gallet and Jérémie Scheidler are mixing their words with mine.

A kind of community of invisible words is being built up as we move from place to place. A community of ills, too, that spans time.

David Geselson

Produced by
Compagnie Lieux-Dits

Compagnie Lieux-Dits is accredited by the Ministère de la Culture – DRAC île-de-France and the Val-de-Marne department as part of its development aid.

The text Unwritten Letters is the winner of CONTXTO Artcena and has been translated in Spanish (Chili) by Millaray Lobos.

The text Lettres non-écrites (Unwritten Letters) is published by Le Tripode publishing

David Geselson received the price Revelation for the first novel 2022 by the Société des Gens de Lettres.