Elemental Writing: Earth
Registration opening soon!
Earth will be our guide.
Ally.
Teacher.
Companion.
This course—maybe better pilgrimage—will be a six-week trek, ramble, and rest for a wandering writer body, longing for re-connection with the heartbeat of the earth.
Elemental writing means:
- infusing our words with vitality through connection and relationship with all the elements—water, earth, fire, wind, and more. Through connection and relationship with everything in the animate world.
- remembering the life in the words and in the act of writing.
- writing not as a brain product or even a heart product, but rather writing as a wholly embodied act of a wholly embodied being.
This adventure is for you if:
- you want your writing to come alive with sensory awareness.
- as a writer, you understand or want to understand yourself as one voice amidst a chorus of many animate beings—plants, mountains, oceans, eagles, stone, starlings, desks, foxes.
- you long for a deeper connection with yourself as part of the animate earth.
- you thirst for something simple, essential, deep, and true.
- you’re hungry for a new vital way to work through or into your writing project.
- you need a course that acknowledges, engages and supports your embodied life as a writer, that puts your work and play as a writer back into your body rather than severing your imagination and your mind from the muscle and breath and blood and bone of you.
- you know or want to know your stories as living beings.
Each week you’ll:
- gather with a small group of other writer-seekers for two and a half hours via Zoom, during which we’ll do our damnedest to stay aware that we’re not just hands on a keyboard or head facing a screen.
- relax and soften into a sacred container, held for you and with you, in which you can work on your book or writing project in progress, allow something new to emerge, or both.
- be enlivened by simple ritual, art-making, and a close encounter with a new earth path.
- generate writing in our live class, as well as be given prompts and tools to use for your writing and revising time outside of class.
- immerse yourself in a particular aspect of earth, exploring the ways that aspect connects with the art, craft, play, and work of writing. We won’t necessarily be writing about earth, but rather with earth, or as earth, connecting with the shape-shifting earth as a guide.
- receive a PDF with highlights of that week’s water way, including prompts, practices, and tools to use during the course and beyond (6 total); you’ll also have access to a Google drive folder with all of these sediments of resources and other supporting materials.
- leave with unexpected treasures, much like a walk on an earthen path.
Here’s an excavated sliver of your six weeks with earth:
Week 1: Landscape. Earth & me: a history, grounding, settling, setting.
Week 2: Dirt. Cultivating fertile ground, make of me a seed, generative writing.
Week 3: Bounty. Reverential harvest/gathering material, writer snacks, writing for pleasure: food & sex.
Week 4: Underground. Riotous roots, burial, compost, we who live underneath, memoir, tense, tension.
Week 5: Dry land. Sand, gifts of creative deserts, intentional scorching/story renovation.
Week 6: Shape. Mountains & canyons, hills and valleys, point of view, closing ritual: in the writer’s cave.
At the end of six weeks, you’ll have
- a collection of tools to take with you to use in all phases of writing: dreaming, generating, revising, shaping.
- deepened your relationship with writing, your story, yourself, with earth, with the world.
- written, every week, in community, fueled by community.
Registration details
Ten spots available. Registration closes June 14, 2022.
Live class dates: June 20 & 27, July 11, 18, 25, August 1 (all Mondays)
Live class time: 1:00 – 3:30 p.m. PST
Investment: $710 USD (payment plans available)
$503 – $710 sliding scale available
Follow the link to the registration form for more info on sliding scale and payment plans.
Registration in 2 steps:
- Fill out the registration form
- An invoice will be sent to you via Paypal
Any questions? Please reach out to me at jenvioli@gmail.com.
