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This workshop will be a purely generative space to write in community toward the Solstice-inspired prompts designed and provided by creative writing midwife, Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, brought to you by (W)rites of Passage. This is an opportunity to contemplate and embrace the stillness of winter, to enter the dream birthed by such a slumber. We will reflect upon this hinge created by the shortest day and the longest night of the year, and investigate the liminal field found between the shadow and the lux, a place where the imagination has no choice but to open. We will step away from the frenzied hustle and consumer-driven bustle of the holiday season to quiet ourselves as we write into this expansion we can cultivate together just by choosing to reclaim 2 1/2 hours for ourselves, for our writing, for our sanity. We will bow to the evergreen standing tall in the winter landscape of our third mind & third heart and then tap this sacred tree and infuse our veins with the slow river of its sap; through the channel that is our bodies, we will transform this elixir into ink from which we can dip our pens to write. Turning then to the snow that blankets a picturesque winter, we will find our canvas, and upon this blank page, spiraling more and more inward, we will investigate the potential that is always gestating deep within by beginning to draw it out one letter at a time. Calling upon the poetic state of bewilderment, we will relocate the universe as forever reflected in the most microscopic of details; here within the specks of dust we can find ourselves again; here we will assume the station of the midwife so we might catch inspiration and deliver the Muse. 

 

The instructor will lead the group in a guided visualization to call our spirits back into our bodies so we might further ground through the act of writing to then levitate on the power of our own words. Expect to write a lot, and for varied stretches of time as your creative well is periodically replenished by a series of potent images, soundscapes, and ideas intended to stimulate and reinvigorate your soul. These exercises might breathe new life into a work-in-progress or give birth to something new just as they might simply nourish you by way of the (w)ritual itself. There will be time designated at the end for participating writers to share what they wrote and/or to process the process. In ceremony, we will feast upon the "both/and" of the mystery and the epiphany as gifted to us by the shadow and the light as Sarah performs a live divination for the collective. ​

 

There is no prep necessary for this class other than to register; otherwise all you need to do is show up to then receive the prompts. Unless you have an injury or disability that makes writing longhand difficult or impossible, you are encouraged to write with a pen or pencil in a notebook, especially as we practice slowing down with each other as our collective witness and guide. ​

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