Writing Towards God finishes as first-ever CI writing workshop series

The Collegeville Institute recently closed out Writing Toward God: the Sacred for the Perplexed, our first-ever digital writing workshop series. Led by Mary Lane Potter, nine writers followed visionary poets and storytellers for six weeks to re-envision God/The Sacred for our time.

The workshop series participants pose for picture on a Zoom session.

The group met every Tuesday evening over Zoom throughout the series. Each week the group read works and writing by a variety of authors, generated new writing in response to the week’s theme, shared their work with others, and read and responded to each other’s submissions. The weekly reading and writing prompts highlighted six approaches: confession, mourning, slant imaginings, absence, mystical threads, and joy. The authors included the likes of Kafka, Rilke, Joy Harjo, Mary Szybist, Yehuda Amichai, Cesar Vallejo, Lucille Clifton, Clarice Lispector, and Jericho Brown.

The workshop series facilitator, Mary Potter, brought a wealth of experience to the workshop. Her books include Strangers and Sojourners: Stories from the Lowcountry, the novel A Woman of Salt, and the memoir Seeking God and Losing the Way. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in Parabola, Witness, River Teeth, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Minerva Rising, Tiferet, Spiritus, SUFI Journal, Leaping Clear, Rogue Agent, Bearings Online, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Formerly a professor of Christian theology, she now writes fiction and creative nonfiction and teaches writing workshops. She has been teaching Collegeville Institute writing workshops since 2013.

The participants talked about their experiences in post workshop evaluations. “I found the fact of the workshop being a series — time spread out across six weeks — to be extremely helpful in allowing practice to happen and ideas to steep during the workshop experience. Also, Mary herself made the experience beautiful.”

Another said, “The writing prompts and the atmosphere in the class, which was respectful and kind while also including suggestions for improvement, was so helpful.”

When asked what was valuable about the experience, one participant commented, “I learned that there are many ways to write, and that it is good to experiment with ways that are unfamiliar to us. Being able to think of my writing as a draft is very liberating and makes me feel freer to experiment.” Another shared, “Our exploration of different voices and tones spoke to me especially and increased my awareness. I think I’ll be using that awareness to play with more possibilities than I otherwise would have been.”

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