In this class, we’ll explore what the people, events, challenges, and experiences in our lives have to teach us, and what we feel, sense, and know—or don’t know—about hope, grace, love, life, and death. Every day we’ll “listen” with our writing to another part of our lives, using prompts and in-class writing to find the concrete details and textured emotional landscapes, the beginnings and endings, the everyday acts and overarching themes enfolded in our lives and stories. As anyone who has engaged with writing in any serious way knows, writing itself is essentially a spiritual endeavor, and in order to write well it’s necessary to tap into the flow of spiritual energy inside each of us, whether we call that energy creativity or inspiration or something else. In the class we’ll use my easy, foolproof method for tapping into the inner wellspring from which all good writing comes, generating new, often surprising writing in an energizing, strictly positive environment. We’ll also spend time working on editing the writing we get, using spiritual skills such as listening to intuition and briefly dropping down into the silence beyond thought, to improve our editing skills and finish some writing we’ve generated. Together we’ll create a small, close-knit community that fosters creativity, engenders fresh material and new ideas, and results in writing that shines from within. This class will be useful for anyone writing essays, a memoir, or a spiritual autobiography; for anyone struggling with perfectionism; and for anyone who’s just getting started or trying to locate their true material. The class welcomes writers at all levels. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week. Feedback on writing generated in class is strictly positive, but we'll work on learning to edit, too.

Our travels through life are unavoidably interesting. Whatever happens to us—a hike through the desert, a night stuck in the airport, a trip to Hawaii, a stay in the hospital—anywhere we go and anything we do there—becomes a captivating adventure if we pay close attention and turn it into a story. And turning whatever happens in our travels into something we can write about makes us pay attention to whatever’s there, while something is happening or after the fact, and that makes everything more interesting and enjoyable; even the hard stuff becomes easier. In this class, we’ll use easy, fun, foolproof writing exercises to turn our travel stories into writing that’s fresh, exciting, and surprising. We’ll create a small creative community in a strictly positive environment. And we’ll talk about how to use writing as a life tool that can turn every trip we go on, whether it’s exciting and wonderful or not so wonderful, into a transformative experience, for us and our readers, allowing us to make the most of our travels through life. This class welcomes writers at all levels. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend. Feedback for in-class writing is strictly positive.