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

In this generative fiction workshop led by PEN/Faulkner award winner Garth Greenwell, we will explore the writing of the Christian mystical tradition—with a particular focus on Saint Augustine—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.

The mystical traditional also produces psychological discoveries that have been fruitful for modern art making, including a profound, non-solipsistic cultivation of inwardness, an openness to emotional extremity, and a sense of how spiritual experience can be radically unstable: how desolation can flip to joy, how dearth can suddenly seem abundance.

Our mornings will be dedicated to independent creative work. In the afternoons, we’ll come together to consider excerpts from Augustine, alongside recent writing (including work by Lauren Groff, Carl Phillips, Fanny Howe, among others) that engages with mystical experience or apophatic thinking. Each day I’ll offer you a prompt emerging from our common reading, and we’ll reserve time for sharing the work you generate in response. In the evenings, I’ll invite you to join me in watching a film that feels to me resonant with the energies and insights of the mystical tradition.

My hope is that you will leave with a renewed sense of excitement about your creative work, and with a handful of new ideas, beginnings, or sketches for narrative projects.

The Collegeville Institute will cover travel expenses to and from the workshop within the continental United States, all workshop fees, and room and board. International travel costs, and travel from Hawaii and Alaska may be shared between the Collegeville Institute and the workshop participant. Those who join the workshop will be expected to reside at the Collegeville Institute throughout the entire term.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, Cleanness, and Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His nonfiction has appeared widely, including in The New Yorker and Harper’s. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Applications are closed for this workshop.