We’ll practice mining ordinary objects and activities for spiritual content, learn the difference between showing and telling, and discuss ways for getting started. Our attention calls forth holiness from our experiences.

The right details bring light and life to a story.  We’ll practice finding details that work and look through our descriptions to the meaning they uncover.

Our sacred journeys find their source and direction in our youngest years, when our first experiences marked us.  How can we explore early memories with compassion, curiosity, and humility?

“Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth,” Audre Lorde wrote, “and that is not speaking.”  Writing memories is an exercise in truth-telling. We’ll learn techniques to facilitate honesty on the page—and in life.

We’ll explore the holographic nature of memoir: Our small stories contain big truths. How can we reconstitute memories on the page so they hold both the vast universe and our beloved particulars?

Resistance—to creativity, to spiritual practice—can be a sign that our small, limited self feels threatened by our essential Self.  When we resist the process of writing or the material that arises, how can we open our hearts to transformation?

It’s no coincidence that we describe the soul’s path as a journey. The physical journeys we’ve taken (whether they’re dog-walks, cross-country trips, or overseas pilgrimages) have much to teach us about the soul’s journey—and about effective writing.

So much of the inner life is indescribable!  How can we possibly write it?  We’ll look at literary examples of enlightenment, emptiness, pain, ecstasy, and use literary tools to wrap language around the ineffable.

The feelings, images, and stories that come to us at night seep into our days and play an active role in our spiritual journeys.  How can we write about them effectively?  How can writing support our dreams to do their healing work?

Writers often find inspiration in experiences of surprising, radical, or gradual personal change.  How can we recreate these to become available to our readers?  We will also dabble in revision as a transformational practice.

Our bodies are trustworthy sources of memory and wisdom. Together we’ll write from our bodies, about our bodies, to our bodies, and with our bodies as a practice of welcoming the Spirit. We’ll also delve into sensory description as a literary technique that invites the reader into our experiences.

“What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love,” Rilke told the young poet. Writing memories can be an expression of this love. We’ll grapple lovingly with our past, practice writing as a loving act, and open ourselves to receiving love through the creative process.

Questions pry open possibilities, expose alternatives, ask that we see through new eyes, motivate, open us to love—and are a writer’s best tool. We’ll explore questions as portals into memory and instruments of revision.

The people in our lives, including ourselves, become characters in our memoir. How do we represent them honestly and respectfully? Learn about character development and how good craft practices are also loving ones.

With intention, creative writing can exercise and strengthen faith—in ourselves, in the creative process, and in our Source.  Shrada, the Sanskrit word for faith, means “the power to hold into one.”  We’ll practice lending this power to our memories.

All memoir is a dialogue between past and present, between the “character” you were then and the “narrator” you are today.  We’ll practice using the reflective voice in memoir as a way to invite perspective and insight.

We’ll experiment with structural possibilities for spiritual memoir, reflect on how form follows function, and practice listening for emergent unity within our memories.

If we don’t take ourselves too seriously, writing can knock our socks off!  We’ll use whimsical entries into memory, learning how to shake off the inner critic and welcome the unexpected, ever-creating spirit.

When we revisit loss and hardship on the page, we may not alleviate our suffering but we do make something from it. When in the midst of grief, what is the best way to nurture our creativity?

It takes a village to raise a child—and to write a story. If every spiritual journey worth its salt lands in community, what does this mean for our most intimate, creative work?