The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest literary works that has survived from the ancient world. Yet the questions at its center remain strikingly familiar: What do we do with the knowledge that we will die? What makes a life meaningful? What do friendship, power, achievement, loss, and responsibility ask of us? And what does it mean to become fully human?

At the beginning of the epic, Gilgamesh is a powerful king who seems to recognize few limits to his desires or authority. His encounter with Enkidu changes the direction of his life. Friendship opens a world beyond the self; adventure leads to both achievement and destruction; and loss confronts Gilgamesh with something his strength cannot overcome. What begins as a story of a king and his exploits gradually becomes a meditation on mortality, civilization, and the limits of human power.

This workshop approaches the epic through two interconnected practices: reading and writing.

Through reading, we enter the world of the text closely and patiently. Rather than treating Gilgamesh simply as a monument of ancient literature, we ask what kind of human world it presents to us. What does the epic say about the movement between wilderness and civilization? About friendship and transformation? About kingship, violence, fame, grief, and the desire to escape death? And what changes when we bring our own questions and experiences into conversation with a text created thousands of years ago?

Writing offers a different way of entering the same questions. It creates a space in which ideas encountered in the text can be explored rather than merely discussed. A scene, a character, an image, or a question from the epic may become the starting point for reflection, interpretation, memory, imagination, or a new piece of writing. The aim is not necessarily to produce a finished literary work, but to use writing as another way of thinking: a way of discovering what becomes visible when we respond to a text in our own words.

The workshop therefore moves back and forth between the ancient text and the present. We are interested both in Gilgamesh as a work that emerged from a particular historical world and in what happens when contemporary readers encounter it. We do not assume that its answers must be ours. Instead, the distance between its world and our own gives us an opportunity to examine ideas that often remain unquestioned: what we mean by civilization, what we expect from friendship, why human beings seek permanence, how we live with loss, and what we consider a life worth living.

Reading together is also central to the workshop. Different readers notice different things, bring different experiences to the text, and may understand the same character or event in very different ways. Conversation therefore becomes part of the reading itself—not as an attempt to arrive at a single correct interpretation, but as a way of testing, expanding, and sometimes revising our own.

Gilgamesh: A Reading & Writing Workshop is ultimately an invitation to spend time with an ancient story and allow it to become a space for contemporary thought: to read carefully, write freely, listen to others, and explore some of the questions that have accompanied human beings for as long as we have been telling stories.