Free Writing Workshop Tonight!
Hi, friends!
I hope your August is off to a wonderful start! I spent last week on the shores of Lake Michigan with my adult kids celebrating their August birthdays—and it was heaven. Of course, catching up on the re-entry side is another story, but so very worth it. I will write a fuller post soon with some fragments from my travels, but for now, I wanted to share a book I’m reading and loving—A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman—which is about exactly what it says: curiosity, the root of wonder, awe, and empathy. Plus, adventure and other good things. Recommended! Also, a few time sensitive opportunities!
Free Narrative Medicine Writing Workshop Tonight, Tuesday, August 9, 6-8 PM Central on Zoom! I’ll be facilitating the writing workshop portion of this forum, the third of six sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Project for Advancing Healthcare Stewardship. The series, called “Uncertain Together,” is held virtually on Zoom and explores our collective experience of the extended Covid-19 pandemic through a close reading of a literary work and a guided writing workshop. This month, we will read and discuss Maggie Smith's iconic poem, "Good Bones." Of the two-hour forum, we spend about 1.5 hours on the narrative medicine writing workshop. If you are free tonight, I'd love to see you! You don't have to be a writer at all, but if you are a writer, you will leave with new material and some new ways of engaging with your current material. Again, the forum is free. You need only to register here.
Writing in the Dark Starts Next Week! And I have a few last spots open if you’d like to join. I created this lively, generative virtual workshop Zoom at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and it is still going strong in year three, with more than twelve sessions and two dozen cohorts (that’s more than 200 writers!) who’ve participated during that time. There is good reason this workshop is so popular: it’s fun, it’s challenging, it’s inspiring, it’s communal (indeed the community is incredible!), and it helps writers produce extraordinary work that so far has been published in an impressive array of journals, from Calyx to Brevity to Manifest Station to Fourth Genre to Hippocampus to Sweet and many more, plus a variety of anthologies. The new session starts August 18, and I would love to write in the dark with you!
“Change Your Story, Change Your Life” is the powerfully true theme of the upcoming 4-day September 8-11 intensive at the beautiful, mid-century modern Hackmatack Retreat Center in Illinois. This intensive, Thriving Along Disturbed Edges: Explore the Threefold Path of Past, Present & Future to Plot Your Best Next Chapter combines yoga, meditation, nature (Hackmatack’s grounds are gorgeous and expansive!) and inventive, surprising, and deeply effective reflective writing exercises to fully—and we really mean fully—imagine yourself into the most alive and dazzling version of what comes next, both on and off the page. This is an extraordinary opportunity to re-imagine your creative life in the most vibrant possible way, while also actively engaging in producing new creative work and gaining specialized tools for enhancing all of your creative processes toward the most illuminated possibilities. This also applies to your life. The idea is that we understand ourselves and others through narrative. It is our tool of meaning-making. Therefore, it is also a powerful, everyday tool for profound transformation. Registration opened last week and we have several spots available for this September intensive and I would be genuinely honored for you to join us! My youngest, Billie Ouellette-Howitz, will teach the yoga (accessible to ALL bodies), and the delightful, funny, skillful, irreverent yet so soulful Tyler Lewke and his partner Grant Goehler will lead meditation.
Our Radical Revision retreat in the stunning beach oasis of Troncones scheduled for this December was booked fully but I was able to secure three more rooms from Present Moment Retreat Center (meaning we have the whole place to ourselves!), and two of those rooms are still open as of today. If you have or want to have a long-form project in motion, this is an incredible opportunity to materialize the best possible version of that project. More info here; inquire as soon as possible, because these spots are likely to fill quickly.
And that’s all for now! Much love to you as we savor these last weeks of summer.
Jeannine
