Meditation for Writers Remote GrubStreet Class

My upcoming GrubStreet workshop is Meditation for Writers, happening through March. I did a short class on this in October—and I’m amazed that these months have gone by (the last blog I wrote was in July). There was a need to both quiet-down and expand in other directions, and I think so many of us during COVID have experienced this, the opportunity (the demand, maybe) to do things differently. It’s been an intensely creative time, as I’ve been working on my next book and projects, and so there was on the one hand the outer—and sometimes inner—turmoil of this time period and ferocity of politics and disease, but on the other, also exciting things happening and the joy of making.

But back to this class! I became a certified meditation teacher because of this exact possibility: bringing it into the writing workshop. It’s hard to express how much I’ve loved this process, seeing what a difference meditation can make to writers, and in particular, how much effect it can have on VOICE. What I often encounter when working with writers, either in workshops or one-to-one, is a challenge around voice, and the accompanying ideas: the right to speak, the right to explore ideas, the right to play, be curious, give life to the vision that’s inside the mind (the one that writers often long to work with but hold back for various reasons). Writing can be so damn tough. Not everyone is called to create, and certainly not everyone is called to be a writer; it often requires enormous stores of energy, grit, a willingness to be intensely vulnerable (and I don’t necessarily mean here the baring of souls; this vulnerability can simply be a fear of working with an authentic voice, being true, a fear of being seen as different or unconventional). Because that’s what happens when we work with the real voice, the deep one. We end up discovering aspects of our own originality, and that can sometimes mean the writer is required to really stand in who they are.

Enter meditation, and this online class, which is for any genre of writer and any level of meditator. We’ll be covering foundations of meditation and mindfulness practice, and exploring each week how these ideas can be applied to writing. For more info and to register, click the button.

On a given Tuesday...

This is coming up next week. It’s a lucky thing to get to read and talk at an event with another writer; sometimes—usually—the other writer is a relative stranger, but in this case the other person is Ron MacLean, a dear friend that I met several years ago when we were both in the inaugural Launch Lab sessions at GrubStreet in Boston. His new book of short stories is We Might As Well Light Something On Fire, and it’s wildly inventive, genre-bending, astute, funny and warm, all of which makes me so happy to get to chat with him at the legendary Newtonville Books. We’re going to read from each other’s collections, and talk about something I like contemplating (and have been mulling recently), which is curiosity. What is curiosity, exactly, how does it function, why does it exist and how do we both use it (or does curiosity use us maybe) and how do we write with it? I want to find out what he thinks of all that, especially since his stories do the sort of bendy things I like to see stories do, and we both write with a certain openness toward boundaries (some might say disregard, but that’s not quite right, since to play with boundaries, it seems to me, is to regard them).