Incorporating Creative Writing & the Mystical Arts
The Sacred Bond of Storytelling situates your writing within an animist experiment.
Is it possible that all matter is interconnected, interdependent?
Is it possible that this state of interbeing exists before matter takes on form?
What if the smallest particle contains the whole?
Consider that when your biological maternal grandmother was in your great grandmother’s womb, already her ovaries contained the egg that would become your mother.
What if the whole is the same as the smallest particle?
“Everything that we are doing, everything that we think, exists already, and we are only intermediaries, that’s all, who make use of what is in the air.”
—Henry Miller, The Art of Fiction No. 28, The Paris Review, 1962
If these allow that these things might be true, then we can imagine the story that we want to write as its own sovereign entity.
We can imagine that this story exists in spirit before it is spoken or written.
Perhaps this is why we can sense it knocking so insistently on our consciousness!
Imagining a story as a sovereign being is creatively liberating.
No longer are we alone with the page trying to drag meaning and form out of our overworked brains.
Instead, we’re in an act of co-creation with an entity who is deeply invested in its own birth.
We’re free to question, experiment, make a mess.
We’re free to play!
In this four week animist experiment, we will have a lot of fun.
Using techniques commonly associated with mystical practices, we’ll explore a specific piece of writing in a new way.
Expect vow-making, guided journeys, doll magic, tarot cards, lectio divina, and more.
You needn’t have experience with any of these techniques in order to participate.
Neither must you believe in magic.
Curiosity, playfulness, and the courage to be weird in a small group are the only requirements.
Details & Expectations
This experience is created with prose writers in mind, both fiction and nonfiction.
We will be generating writing during our meetings and on our own.
For our final meeting you will be asked to submit no more than one thousand words to our group a few days before our meeting.
You will also be asked to read your fellow group members’ submissions before our last meeting begins.
Each gathering is three hours long.
We will meet in person at my home in Decatur, Georgia.
Classes will not be recorded.
Dates
This class will be offered again in 2025. Message if you’re interested.
“If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in a human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
