Write Wild
A Generative Retreat
SOLD OUT
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TAKE A WHOLE DAY OFF TO EXPLORE, EXPERIMENT, AND (RE)GENERATE
WRITE WILD is a day-long creative writing retreat focused on generating new ideas and work. In four 90-minute sessions, each led by a different facilitator, you'll experiment outside your usual form, genre, and style, allowing you to peek around the corner of your usual creative process to discover what lies beyond.
Write Wild is back with four brand new sessions that facilitate experimentation, collaboration, and working across the genres and forms you are used to. All writers are welcome, as well as visual artists and other creative spirits who want to explore their creativity more through the written word (and feel free to bring a sketchbook or camera, too). Let go of self-censorship, be inspired by creative forces outside yourself, and see how your work changes when you look at it from other angles.
Our guest facilitator is Kelly Sundberg, whose memoir about domestic violence, Goodbye Sweet Girl, will be out in June, 2018 from HarperCollins. Her essays appear or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Slice, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her essay, "It Will Look Like a Sunset" was included in Best American Essays 2015, and another essay was listed as notable in Best American Essays 2013. She blogs about domestic violence at kellysundberg.com.
Sharing your work is always optional. Facilitation will be in English, but you should feel free to write in any language.
Sessions
Write On: Writing Beyond the Limits
Patricia Coral
When and why do we stop writing? What limits do we set for our words? Are we holding back? Factors of self-censorship, a fear of breaking boundaries, or an adhesion to rules that don't serve us or our work can all lead us to leaving a lot unsaid. In this session, we will encourage you to allow yourself to keep going and introduce strategies for writing beyond your usual stopping points for a deeper (and maybe even new) understanding of your stories.
Excavating A Life: Mining Your Personal Experience for Truth
Kelly Sundberg
Life experiences are diverse, but truth can be universal, which means it illuminates the human condition by finding the meaning in everyday interactions. You don’t need to have lived an exciting life to write, but accessing an exciting (or new) perspective can help guide your way towards discovering the underlying truths in your individual experiences. In this session, we'll introduce exercises and strategies for finding and writing universal truth by digging into our memories and daily lives and excavating them for material.
The Hidden Shape of Your Words: Discovering New Layers Within Your Stories
Tayyba Maya Kanwal
Whether we're aware of it or not, everything we write has a shape: the stories we tell can loop back on themselves, burst from a center, or intertwine multiple threads to create meaning. In this session we will play with manipulating the shapes our writing takes, both in a literal and figurative sense. We will play with time, with structure, with resonance and repetition, developing a sense for shaping our words with purpose. You might see your pieces unfold in new, unexpected ways and discover new meanings and readings of your work.
The Magic of the Ordinary: Pulling Meaning Out of the Mundane
Layla Al-Bedawi
After a day of looking inside ourselves and our stories for new inspirations and revelations, we'll end the day by looking out into the world around us. As creators, we'll practice looking at ordinary or (to us) unimportant things, places, and words, and imbuing them with meaning, bringing them to life in creative ways.
SOLD OUT
Max Participants: 12
Cost: $95
Facilitators:
Kelly Sundberg
Layla Al-Bedawi
Patricia Coral
Tayyba Maya Kanwal