“Writing Toward God” workshop series wraps up

The Collegeville Institute recently closed out Writing Toward God: the Sacred for the Perplexed, a six-week digital writing workshop series. This was the second time Mary Lane Potter led this workshop series designed for writers familiar with the struggle to articulate changing experiences of God in today’s world. 

For six weeks this winter, ten writers met over Zoom each Tuesday evening to explore different approaches to writing toward God and the Sacred, including confession, mourning, slant imaginings, absence, mystical threads, and joy. 

Each week, workshop participants read works by visionary contemporary poets and storytellers, from Kafka and Rilke to Joy Harjo and Jericho Brown. The readings demonstrated numerous different modes of spiritual writing; one participant described the syllabus as “thought-provoking, wild, and wonderful.” 

These readings, and the class discussions they inspired, served as jumping-off points for participants to generate new writing of their own. One participant wrote that the readings “opened my mind and helped me feel free to write more bravely.” Another commented, “I’ve written more new, interesting, and unexpected things during these six weeks than I had over the past few years.”

Each week, participants read their new work to the group and responded to one another’s writing—an experience one described as “nerve-wracking but also exhilarating.” Multiple participants commented that Mary Lane Potter’s skilled and compassionate facilitation created an atmosphere where they could take risks and be vulnerable in their writing. She “made it a safe, sacred, and brave place from the very first night,” wrote one participant. Another said, “This space, even over Zoom, became a holy place for our community of writers—for exploration, raw honesty, experimentation, feedback, and connection.” 

Many of the writers described coming away from this workshop feeling inspired and energized by the readings, Mary’s teaching, and each other. “I was so inspired by everyone’s talents and gifts of writing, not to mention everyone’s varied perspectives on the divine,” a participant wrote in their final evaluation. “We are all so different, having very human experiences, and yet everyone came in authentically as themselves.”

Like this post? Subscribe to have new posts sent to you by email the same day they are posted.