Restorative Writing Series
Open to writers in all genres
Limited to 6 people to ensure ample attention to each person’s work and process
These workshops are designed to bring new energy to your writing. Each session offers a nourishing context and provides camaraderie to refresh your perspective and help you find points of entry.
The structure for these workshops is inspired by one-day sittings in Zen practice, attuning to the rhythm of different modes of concentration throughout the day. The schedule allows ample time for writing, both in guided exercises, and on your own.
We’ll cultivate a stable and responsive circle of attention. Each participant will have opportunities to read their work and discuss aspects of their process throughout the day.
Guided writing exercises will offer practices and prompts that will help you deepen your work. You can use the exercises to delve further into existing work or to develop new work.
Above all, we will cultivate an ethos of care and respect for each other’s risks and offerings.
THE FALL GARDEN
Closing one Cycle, Turning toward the Next
There’s energy in reckoning the beginning of a new season. Plants have come through their summer cycle and we can refresh plantings for a different set of conditions, whether that be a late harvest in San Francisco, or an early frost in Vermont.
This workshop takes a cue from our resilient and intelligent landscapes and explores how we can inhabit our own cycles as writers with curiosity and deep listening.
One way this idea of cycles can translate to 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.
You are welcome to bring an existing piece of writing to work with, or to write directly from the exercises.
WHY LOVE WHAT YOU WILL LOSE
Writing Through Grief
Why love what you will lose? There is nothing else to love.
Louise Glück
Major shifts and challenges in our lives can spark our most urgent writing, even as words can feel insufficient to the magnitude of our experience. And yet, the act of writing itself has an astounding capacity to replenish us.
In this workshop we’ll read short pieces from writers who find ways to speak when words seem impossible. And we’ll explore ways to write into, or through experience. In generative exercises we’ll practice working with particular detail, gesture, and dialogue, and other elements that foster immediacy, a way to extend our own experience to others.
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.
A PLANK IN REASON BROKE
Poetry and Uncertainty
The hallmark trait of the poet, for John Keats, is the capacity for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
The uncertainty Keats speaks of is not a blandly passive what.ev.er, but rather an actively curious posture of being, an empathic flexibility, opening up space for receptivity, discovery, and vision.
Certainly we have no shortage of uncertainty these days. Uncertainty often settles in as an uncomfortable, problematic state, something we have to endure on our way to the preferred state of certainty: once we can know what we’re doing, then our life will be real! But what if we reconsider uncertainty as a rich ground of possibility and generativity? What is the role of accident and chance for a receptive, responsive mind?
How do we stay in this uncomfortable position of not knowing long enough to allow new work to come into being? What Robert Motherwell said of painting is perhaps true of tolerating uncertainty as well: it cannot be taught, but it can be learned.
We’ll develop supportive strategies for working in a friendly way with hindrances. We’ll also assemble some intentions and practices for keeping a process journal.
THE FEAST OF LOSSES
Writing into Transience
Death is the mother of beauty. Wallace Stevens
Turning toward what is difficult to bear can instruct us in the full catastrophic miracle of each day. As we write into transience, we might begin to find footing within the constantly shifting nature of our lives.
In the work we will read, we will entertain the possibility that there is no monolithic scary proposition that can be simply called “loss.” We’ll explore the relationship of creativity and grief. Is there a place no poem can reach? Or can reading a poem actually help us reach into depths of feeling previously inaccessible to us? What do we find there and how is it different from what we fear?
The workshop will be generative, experiential, and analytical. Writing exercises will prismatically explore the topic, in brief passages, that can build on ongoing writing, or become starting points for new writing.
THE HUM OF YOUR VALVED VOICE
The Poetics of Listening
We’ll explore speech and conversation as the seedbed of poetry. Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests that “the poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened,” but perhaps this formulation underestimates the degree to which conversation is already teeming with the very features we associate with poetry: repetition, rhythm, metaphor, to name a few. And still, we recognize what he’s pointing to; the distilled, charged nature of poetic language – almost recognizable, but just a little strange – startles us into immediacy, into seeing something we’ve never quite seen.
Participants are encouraged to record and transcribe a sample of “ordinary” conversation (by phone, or, where possible, in person) before our meeting. We’ll listen closely into these samples for starting points and develop those into lyric passages.
Our reading will focus on poems/stories in which the quality of listening feels particularly attuned.
SWATCHING
A Knitting Workshop for Writers
Open to all; new and more experienced knitters will emerge with fresh ideas and connections.
[Note: This workshop requires these skills: casting on, the knit stitch, casting off. I will offer a 45-minute tutorial on these skills 1 week prior to the workshop. (additional $15)]
This is primarily a writing workshop, with knitting as a means through which to explore aspects of the writing process. Our focus will be on establishing several techniques to support your writing practice.
In using three basic knitting skills, casting on, the knit stitch, and casting off, we’ll consider how practicing this ostensibly simple craft gives us a way of noticing habits of mind that possibly also arise in our writing process. We’ll engage in a sequence of writing exercises that builds on these connections.
Participants will knit a test swatch, paying attention to what comes up for them in relation to such things as, time, perfectionism, “errors”, rhythm, materiality, starting, finishing, undoing, etc.
We will extend the process of swatching and write a series of studies or “swatches” that can serve as the basis for further work, or deepen the work on an existing piece. Throughout our time together, we’ll reflect on how in picking up needles and yarn, we can cultivate our own capacities for curiosity, patience, generosity, resilience, connection, and compassion.
Supplies needed: 1 set of knitting needles (straight or circular, any size, but size 8 – 11 recommended for easier viewing on zoom! + yarn that’s worsted weight or thicker, again for easier viewing. But you’re welcome to use whatever you have on hand.
If you’ll need to purchase needles and yarn, here are some recommendations. Again, any size yarn and needles will work for the purposes of the class. We’ll be knitting an approx. 3” x 3” swatch. Feel free to check in if you have questions.
- A Verb for Keeping Warm
free shipping on orders of $30 + curbside pickup in Oakland
https://www.averbforkeepingwarm.com
- Purl Soho (free shipping)
needles + this yarn, this one, or this extremely gorgeous yarn
- Webs: (shipping costs vary)
Berkshire Bulky is an excellent yarn for learning ($7/skein.)
These needles in size 9 or 10.5 would work well.
PLAYING SCALES
Expanding your Writing Repertoire
Some of our strongest writing comes as a surprise, and, in that moment, seems effortless. We can’t schedule or plan for such moments, but there are practices we can do to cultivate our responsiveness and technical skill. Even the most virtuosic pianists play scales to maintain their fluidity, spontaneity, and precision.
By playing scales, a pianist moves through the sounds of each key, through dynamics of touch, speed, tone, and volume, with the freedom that comes from these qualities not being tied to a specific piece. In writing, we rarely set out to write just to move through the paces of what language offers in terms of sound, syntax, word formation, or figurative language.
We demand that we have something to say before we even sit down to write. One consequence of such an all-or-nothing relationship with writing is more often the latter: nothing! This workshop will offer students an array of exercises in form, image, and perception that will allow them to deepen their relationship to language and to generate new work.
Each person will develop a tailored set of “scales and arpeggios” that will continue to serve their writing practice.
CONTACT TRACING
Participants will write poems and keep a process journal, tracing an idea through its originating rustle, attending to their writing process, paying attention to generative strategies, following a poem through the seed of an idea to what we think of as a finished poem.
They will also assemble a commonplace book of what feels kindred to or supportive of their writing practice. They’ll assemble a portfolio that combines their own work in conversation with poems and process notes that inspire them.
The best writing workshops ever
Thank you, Gary! Hope you’re doing well ;)