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Writing Classes


The following is a partial list of the classes I've taught in various venues.

  • Sometimes, the hardest part of writing is getting started. This class gets the pen moving and keeps it moving.

    Explore how the practice of writing — rather than the performance — can lead you to stories you didn’t even know you had to tell. 

    Stir memory and imagination with in-class exercises designed to wake up the writer within.

  • Explore what it means to re-vision a piece of prose.

    • Apply craft to what may have begun as a cathartic release of emotion or capturing of story

    • Figure out when and why a piece needs to be reworked

    • Learn how to “open up” a story

    • Find a new structure for a story in need of it

    Using in-class writing exercises, you’ll overcome some of rewriting’s more formidable stumbling blocks, including:

    1. Breaking back into the text

    2. Letting go of what you love

    3. Keeping the creative spirit alive in revision

    Bring a “worked-on” draft, a piece of promising free writing, or a notebook of writing, some of which you’d like to take to the next level.

  • Landscapes are an essential element of our personal stories—the places we're from, the places we've visited, and the places that attract or repel us.

    Create new writing using both memory and observation and discover how writing about a landscape can answer the question: Who am I?

  • Write the indelible moments of life—those that connect us to the mysterious, the numinous, and the un-nameable (or whatever name you use). 

    Use in-class exercises and readings as inspiration for writing about spiritual experiences, whether dramatic or ordinary. Write your life story using a lens that reveals patterns, meaning, and surprise.

  • Transform the raw straw of your life’s experience into gold. In this class, you’ll write the stories of your life—the birthings and endings, the passions and shadows, the journeys and the still moments of your experience.  

    We'll enter our lives through the “back door” and explore how to create stories we never even knew we needed to tell. This process will give you the opportunity to make important discoveries about yourself, and most important, to create art from life.

  • It’s easy in our hectic lives to fall out of balance and lose touch with our center. Use the practices  of yoga, and journaling to slow down and return to the center of who we are.

    Giving ourselves the time and space to truly be inside ourselves can give us access to greater energy and freedom as well as a deeper sense of well-being.

    No experience necessary.