| Dreams of a River The 1988 IWP year was the first and the most important gathering, in terms of number and diversity, of novelists, poets and playwrights I have ever taken part in. It was the kind of experience where you feel you have to be all eyes and ears, not the least because you find yourself among established and promising writers, in new cultural and geographical surrounding, but the main reason is that it profoundly resonates in your own work You feel part and parcel of a whole community dedicated to literary activity and its expression in writing, readings, debates, workshops, visits...A healthy competition drives you to write, talk and listen. To do that, you need a language, one or more. The desire to communicate with no delay, understand and be understood, read the way writers read, write the way they see writing, urged me to try my hand at the first short story ever in English. "An Icelandic Dream" was born out of all these, and the stimulating encounter with an Icelandic playwright and his sculptor wife, both part of the IWP. That Algeria and Iceland, two countries geographically poles apart, met in history centuries ago, left me with a deep sense of loss. The loss that touches upon identity as it has been defined by history, and which suddenly erupts like a dormant volcano awakening. Thanks to the leap into the world and the mysteries of the English language,History, from the point of view of literature, opened up new territories to be explored. "Writing in the Mirror of a River" and other stories followed. Strolling alone or among writers along the Iowa river, day in, day out, in hot and cold weather, leaves traces on the imagination. Discussions with oneself or with fellow writers center most of the time around the inner recesses and the history of the stories, the kind of preoccupations that are invisible to readers yet are always there, driving writers to pursue their literary activity. Being essentially a novelist in the French language, I learned in the course of the IWP adventure the instinctual art of the short story with the help of a tool most suited to it--the English language and its economy. Like the essay, the short story does not endeavour to exhaust things; it tries to capture the essence of immediacy, of the current state of the human individual. It is, so to speak, a lightning conductor which measures what has just disappeared. Med Magani
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