“Summer requires fearlessness. Spring can be fearful; for its blossoms apprehension is like a home. But fruit requires a calm and heavy sun.” Rilke, The Florence Diary, May 17, 1898
Restorative Writing Workshops
Open to writers in all genres
Limited to 4 people, to ensure ample attention for each participant’s work & process.
Light refreshments will be provided.
10 – 3
These workshops are designed to offer a supportive context and provide resources to refresh your perspective and help bring new energy to your writing.
We’ll cultivate a stable and responsive circle of listening in which students can find camaraderie and encouragement in their writing process.
Students will engage in writing exercises and will learn several practices that will help find entry points and sustain their writing practice. Exercises can be easily applied to poetry or prose. You can use the exercises to delve further into existing work or to develop new work.
Students will have the opportunity to share their work with the group and receive informal feedback.
The workshop cultivates an ethos of care and respect for each other’s risks and offerings.
2
WHY LOVE WHAT YOU WILL LOSE: WRITING THROUGH GRIEF
Why love what you will lose? There is nothing else to love. Louise Glück
Saturday, September 8, 10-3
Major shifts and challenges in our lives can spark our most urgent writing. At the same time, when something so deeply affects us, how do we begin to write “about” it?
In this workshop we will explore ways to write into, or throughexperience. In generative exercises we’ll practice working with particular detail and dialogue, and other elements that foster immediacy.
We’ll discuss how routine can create stability for the unsettling process of writing in this difficult terrain. Writers who are exploring ways to move through resistance or who would like to begin to approach something they have not yet found a way to write into may find the workshop especially helpful.
Each participant will have opportunities to read their work and discuss some aspect of their process throughout the day.
SCHEDULE:
10:00 – 10:15 Introduction/s
10:15 – 11:00 Craft + Process
11:00 – 11:30 Guided writing
11:35 – 12:05 Sharing & Conversation
12:15 – 1:00 Lunch break
1:00 – 1:30 Craft + Process
1:35 – 2:05 Guided writing
2:10 – 2:30 Vault [quiet work] period
2:35 – 3:00 Sharing & Response
Fee: $150
To Register, please send an email to indicate which workshop you’d be interested in taking and you’ll receive an email with further payment information. Thank you!
[past workshops]
1
THE FIFTH SEASON: Settling into the “dry spell”
Saturday, August 25, 10-3
August in California can feel like the equivalent of the depths of a northeastern winter in that a kind of “summer dormancy” sets in. After months without rain, the landscape seems to hold still, conserving its resources, drawing from deep reserves. The green flush of spring has given way to pale silvery foliage and dry grasses. Even within this, though, somehow the elderberry is draped with its clusters of fruit.
This workshop takes a cue from this resilient and intelligent landscape and explores how we can inhabit our own quieter periods as writers with curiosity and deep listening, learning from these seasonal rhythms the place of rest within a writing practice.
One way that this idea translates into writing could be in thinking about a piece that you’ve been writing for a while and have maybe set down, picking that up again and inquiring into what it might still be holding for you and find some new ways to enter it.
Each participant will have opportunities to read their work and discuss some aspect of their process throughout the day.
You are welcome to bring an existing piece of writing to work with, or to write directly from the exercises.