ANNOUNCING TWO NEW WORKSHOPS:
Weekend intensive in Northeast Seattle, Feb.10-11: Saturday 10am-4 pm, Sunday 1.30-4.30 pm. Cost: $450
Zoom workshop, Five Saturdays, March 2-30, 10-12.30 pm. Cost: $585
Weekend retreats on Orcas Island and Whidbey Island, dates TBD.
Please contact me for more information and to register. We can also arrange a new course if you have a group.
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Workshops are offered in various formats, from one-day intensives to weekly meetings.
Creative Writing Retreat
Writing gives you the means, not just to express, but to listen—to the truth, alive and changing, within your own self. All too often, a ceaseless round of activities and obligations sweeps us along. Perhaps we’re afraid of what lies within and the feelings that might be aroused. This writing retreat offers a precious opportunity to turn away from distraction and navigate, with support, any obstacles that arise, to cultivate stillness and in that stillness, discover that which longs to be known and expressed.
Exercises and guided discussion provide a supportive framework for opening to your personal experience of reality, and with the help of discussion and feedback, you get to cultivate the processes and techniques most helpful to you. What emerges may be joyful or it may be painful and fraught, but there is wonder in the discovery and a fierce joy in aligning with the truth. And there is knowing the extraordinary depths of spirit and heartfulness that are always available to us.
Creative Writing Weekly Workshop
These workshops guide you through a dynamic series of exercises towards the writing of deeper and ever more accomplished work. Solitary work alternates with group work, free-writes with improvisation. It’s a carefully designed, malleable framework within which the individual writer’s imagination and mind are stimulated to explore new paths and attain new heights. Beginners and non-beginners alike are surprised by what they are able to bring forth.
In the process, you learn about literature from the inside. Literary techniques that are covered (at every level) include imagery, form, syntax, narrative structure, rhythm, characterization and character arcs, plot development, dialogue. All genres are explored: poetry, fiction, plays, some-as-yet-undiscovered hybrid or new form…
My priority is to provide a safe environment within which each person—with their individual talents and inclinations—feels free to explore and take risks. After all, this is the gift of writers to the world: they have the courage to say the thing that cannot be said—because it’s too embarrassing, ugly, vulnerable, contradictory, or impossibly beautiful. Too something. This then is what writing can provide you—a unique opportunity to know yourself and the world that is yours and no one else’s. You are then that much more prepared to bring your whole self to life and to the lives of others.
Language and Our Earth
These days we often look to other cultures to learn not just about specific pro-earth technologies but also about different ways of inhabiting our environment spiritually and conceptually. We sense that we need a radical transformation in consciousness. We’re groping but we’re also guided, searching for answers that lie within us. Language and creative expression have a profound role to play in this next chapter in our evolution.
How can language repair the rifts in our consciousness? Must our language itself be changed? The experiment is boundless and shaped by the individual writer. In this workshop, participants are invited to tune in to their personal experiences, delving into the mysteries of their relation to the environment, articulating moments of connection as well as disconnection. The experiment is scientific and intensely creative at the same time. We get to invent the outcome.
Self-Exploration and Affirmation
Creative writing is inseparable from creative living. We know we are writing well when our own words transform us, breaking open new channels, rearranging us on the inside. My focus in these workshops is on process, for the self-exploration never ends, just as our changes never do. Learning ways of navigating the constantly shifting territory of our inner world, we feel that much more awake and empowered.
The process that interests me draws on all our faculties and engages every part of our being. It is intellectual and intuitive. It is oriented towards the future and fully in touch with the past. It thoroughly engages the body, which is the storehouse of memory, the seat of emotional truth, and the fount of our energy. It relies on the mind and our miraculous ability to observe our own selves in action.
Using guided meditation and written exercises, I invite individuals into profound relationship with themselves. If we are to move forward and liberate sources of energy blocked by inhibition or fear, then it can only be with our whole being, integrating every part, even when it seems counterproductive, small or irrelevant. I have no illusions about the difficulties, both cognitive and emotional, in embracing the complex, layered realities of who we are. A large part of my job then is to imbue the process with curiosity and ease, pleasure and a sense of adventure. After all, we are amazing beings, as profoundly mysterious and rich with potential as every other part of this constantly evolving world.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to write.