Event Category Archives: Writing Workshop

This is the event type for writing workshops.

Jessica JacobsPoetry, Scripture, & Imagination: A Workshop for Preachers with Jessica Jacobs

In this workshop, poet and essayist Jessica Jacobs will draw on her experience researching and writing unalone, a collection of poems in conversation with Genesis—and on Ignatian contemplation; the midrashic practice of close reading; and the use of literary techniques like the expansive use of figurative language—to offer some new possible pathways into exploring the text and then compelling your listeners to join you on that journey.

Writing with the MysticsWriting with the Mystics: A Generative Fiction Workshop with Garth Greenwell

In this generative workshop led by PEN/Faulkner award winner Garth Greenwell, we will explore the writings of three profound thinkers of the Christian mystical tradition—Julian of Norwich, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhardt—to suggest meaningful new territories in our creative work. At the heart of mystical or apophatic thinking is the same intuition that fuels much creative writing: a sense of the profound inadequacy of language to represent certain kinds of experience. This intuition can lead to remarkable linguistic innovation, an attempt to somehow supercharge language with meaningfulness, to make it a more expansive, more capacious medium.

Writing in an Age of Anxiety, a workshop with Sara Billups

With a focus on essays, memoir, and other narrative forms, this program is designed to energize writers and welcome creative thinking in this cultural moment. Short readings, generative prompts and workshops will be matched with spacious time for work and rest. Alongside peers, you will consider if anxiety can be a companion—not to work despite, but rather in the midst of—to surface more human, honest, and meaningful work.

Out of the depths: writing prayer: a poetry workshop with Marie Howe

In this workshop, guided by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marie Howe, we will read and write prayer poems. Each day we’ll read poems written by poets from the past as well as contemporary poets. Looking closely at the poems – at tone and diction and image, and line and syntax and rhythm etc. ) – we will broaden the possibilities for our own voices. We will practice radical receptivity. We take time to generate our own prayer poems each day and have the opportunity to share with each other.

Reading and Writing with Joan Didion (a workshop led by Alissa Wilkinson)

Joan Didion often said that the way a writer says things is even more revealing than what they say. What can we learn about the work of writing from her? In this workshop, we’ll devote a week to Didion’s work, particularly concentrating on her essays, discovering the ways she approached specific craft challenges. We’ll practice close reading of Didion’s work. We’ll write.  And we’ll workshop our work. (The work we’ll workshop will be work we generate during our time together — participants will not circulate already-written work ahead of time.) Long-standing devotees of Didion and those new to her work are warmly welcome!