The Sacrament of the Moment: A Spiritual Writing Workshop

The first sentence of St. Teresa of Avila’s spiritual masterpiece, Interior Castle, is: “Not many things that I have been ordered to do under obedience have been as difficult for me as is this present task of writing about prayer.” And yet she found the words, the voice, the rhythms, and the images that keep us reading her to this day.

Writing that makes more of life visible in its attention to the spiritual is challenging in any age. In our own time, a range of anxieties and the constant presence of technologies competing to monetize our attention make it difficult to experience, much less describe, what Thomas Merton once called “the sacrament of the moment.”  This workshop is an opportunity to reorient our attention, in our living and in our writing, to the sacred in our midst. It is an opportunity to continue a writing project already begun or to get one off the ground in the company of other writers seeking to articulate the spiritual dimensions of our lives, the possibilities of new forms of community, and the crises of our time.

Each day, there will be extended writing time as well as time to discuss each other’s work, one-on-one meetings with the workshop leader, craft talks, writing exercises, and engagement with visiting writers.

This workshop welcomes writers at all levels working in creative nonfiction, fiction, or poetry.
Participants will submit 10–12 pages of writing approximately six weeks before the workshop. These pages will be circulated among all participants and will serve as the basis for several hours of group creative writing workshop discussion during the week. There will also be no more than 50 pages of additional pre-reading.

Faculty Bio

Stephanie Paulsell is the author of Religion Around Virginia Woolf, Honoring the Body: Meditations on Christian Practice, co-author (with Harvey Cox) of Lamentations and the Song of Songs, and editor of Toni Morrison: Goodness and the Literary Imagination and The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher. She is the Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies Emerita at Harvard Divinity School where she served full-time on the faculty from 2001-2024. She recently moved to Albemarle County, Virginia with her husband, Kevin Madigan.

Application Process: Applications due by . Apply here.