New Workshop for early Spring 2025

nOTHING IS HIDDEN

Explorations in Buddhist Thought, Psychoanalysis, and Literature
February 20 - May 1, 2025 | Thursdays, 9-10:30 PST | 12 - 1:30 EST | Zoom

Psychoanalytic, Buddhist, and literary works indicate a vast internal expanse for which each discipline attempts to find language. However abstract the terms for describing variations of this space may seem–the unconscious, emptiness, or Keats’ concept of “negative capability,” our psychic contact with this terrain in all cases has powerful implications for affecting how we thrive and how we suffer. 

This is a course rooted in a commitment to the paradox of exploring through language that which resists language. In bringing together Psychoanalytic, Buddhist, and literary texts, it’s not just that we now have the tools each discipline offers, but the very gaps between them become generative in themselves. 

Through writing exercises designed in response to the readings, we will explore the forms Buddhist thought, psychoanalysis, and literature have found to approach what is both unsayable and more real even than what we call “reality.” 

The goal will be to generate creative work that emerges from this exploration, a seed for both creative and clinical work. We will share the pieces in a workshop format, along with discussion that will mine the relationship between form and content in the works we read, and in each participant’s particular voice. 

Readings

Our readings will include selections from: 

  • Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind; Eihei Dogen, Shobogenzo; the Vimalakirti Sutra; Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva; Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap; Rev. Earthlyn Manuel, The Shamanic Bones of Zen; Koshin Paley Ellison, Untangled.
  • Mark Epstein, D.W. Winnicott, Darlene Ehrenberg, Édouard Glissant, Donnell Stern, Jeremy Safran, James Stoeri, Edgar Levinson, Christopher Bollas   
  • Jean Valentine, Catherine Barnett, Kara Walker, Amina Cain, Agnes Martin, John Keats, Forrest Gander, Terrance Hayes, Farnoosh Fathi, Renée Gladman, Fernando Pessoa, John Keats, Major Jackson, Jane Hirshfield, Kay Ryan, Lydia Davis, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Ganson, Elizabeth King, Martin Puryear, Francis Ponge, Phillis Levin, Jana Prikryl.  

Instructors

ERICA EHRENBERG has taught creative writing at NYU, Fordham, and Stanford Universities, as well as for the Stanford online continuing education program. Her poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Paris Review Podcast, Poetry Daily, The Bennington Review, the Harvard Review, Guernica, BOMB Magazine, The Common, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, and elsewhere. Her short-form essay “On the Question of Dreaming” is forthcoming in Critica. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, she has just graduated from Psychoanalytic training at The National Institute for the Psychotherapies where she received The Educator’s Award for Outstanding Scholarly Paper. An Associate Editor at Psychoanalytic Perspectives, she will be opening a private practice this winter. 

GENINE LENTINE is the author of Archaeopteryx, Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model,   Mr. Worthington’s Beautiful Experiments on Splashes,  and, and co-author with Stanley Kunitz of The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. She received an MS in Theoretical Linguistics from Georgetown University and an MFA in Poetry from NYU. As Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco Zen Center (2009-10), she curated The Expert’s Mind: Ten Interdisciplinary Talks, and Nothing is Hidden, a series of readings, screenings and artist talks. She taught Writing and Contemporary Practice at The San Francisco Art Institute and stewarded an interdisciplinary garden space known as The Meadow. She works 1:1 with writers and artists and teaches ongoing workshops.

REGISTER

 

Course fee: $750
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Thursdays, 12 – 1:30 EST
Zoom
10 weeks:  February 20  – May 1, 2024
[March 27: no session]