Coming up: "Writing as a Spiritual Practice"

Well, yikes. A couple of days ago I grabbed one of the last available spots for a weekend workshop March 2-4 at the Iowa Writers' House in Iowa City, "Writing as a Spiritual Practice." I'd been seeing ads and felt drawn towards it but had thought I might be traveling somewhere; I haven't made plans to do so, though, and when I saw the announcement that there were a couple of spots left I decided to leap.

The description of the workshop attracts me:  

Writing is inherently lonely, as anyone who’s sat staring at a page (or a computer screen) waiting for inspiration can corroborate. But that solitude also has great spiritual potential. In this course, we’ll explore ways to stay spiritually centered as a writer, regardless of your subject matter. You’ll be asked to share a piece of writing that’s on a spiritual topic or relates in some way to your spiritual path. During the weekend we’ll try out some mindfulness techniques that can prepare us for writing and share stories about how the creative process is intertwined with questions of meaning and purpose. You don’t have to be a member of a faith community to participate—all seekers are welcome.

I'm pretty nervous about a full weekend surrounded by people I will think of as "real writers." And I am not without ambivalence about spiritual practice and talking about writing publicly in those terms, since I am not "practicing" anything outwardly in recent years, although I certainly don't resist diving deep into my psyche and profound questions of meaning. I'm worried I will feel like a faker in multiple different ways. But I do regard my project as deeply spiritual, both in terms of its obvious historical subject matter, its engagement with my own history of religious involvement and how that influenced what I chose to study, and how it records my attempt to grapple with the deepest truths in my own life. I find I am often thinking about and sometimes mentioning "the sacred" in what I am writing, though I don't mean it in a theistic or doctrinaire sense, and I'm not always sure I can define how I mean it. Deep down I do think I belong in whatever will happen in that workshop. I am writing about conversion, and courage, and martyrdom, and devotion, and loss, and female life journeys, and the whole question of what one chooses to live for and to love in extreme situations. And I am a published writer, right? Even if only an academic one.

And yes, when I am engaged in working on this project, it does feel like spiritual practice of some kind -- to write creatively/personally is a spiritual reclamation. I was trying to draft something while I was in Mexico about how I silence myself and listen to the language coming through me in order to write, and how this feels like it has a connection to silent worship and the flow of language in 17th-century Quaker ministry and discourse. All writing feels that way to me to some degree, when it feels authentic at all. There is a rhythm I hear that is both lyrical and a kind of prophetic chant. But clearly I am choosing to write in a way that unleashes this flow in a freedom is directly spiritual for me, rather than constraining that dimension within writing that is "appropriate" and "professional."

No, I don't know much about the leader, beyond what I've read on her website. That she's a woman makes me more interested in going. Female mentors are such a prominent theme in my own life as sacred story.

So we'll see what happens. So grateful that a greyhound friend in Coralville is willing to dog-sit for me during the sessions, and then I'll take Cocoa to a dog-friendly motel for the overnights (not optimal for socializing with workshop participants if that happens, and I do wonder eagerly about the "kindred spirits" I might be able to meet, but you do what you have to, especially with short notice).

I am waiting for more information about the workshop and how to prepare for it, but the description says we will be asked to share a piece of writing. So of course I am thinking about what to share out of the mass of roughly-drafted material I am accumulating. My thought so far is that I will share this piece from the first section, as I think it pulls together various dimensions in an inception moment that won't require too much advance explaining -- I think I can establish the essential context in a sentence or two.  It talks about the moment when Mary Dyer followed Anne Hutchinson out of the church upon Anne's excommunication, which is when attention was drawn to Mary being "the woman who had the monster." This is also the moment which, when it first registered on me in the 1990s, began my particular interest in Mary Dyer.  So it is kind of a balance point between the "other" and "self" material in the project.

*********************************

As I realize more about what it is doing, I am getting quite excited about the Iowa Writers' House as a resource. It was only founded in 2014, out of the recognition that for all Iowa City's prominence as a place for creative writing, there really weren't many opportunities for people not connected with the official MFA Writers' Workshop. So the founder took it upon herself to create a center for writing community.

It makes me think more about Iowa City as I place I might want to move if I change my life from what it has been -- I am drawn towards places with landscapes that are more exciting to me, like South Dakota, but then I reflect on my friends in and around eastern Iowa, my deep love for old houses which are plentiful there, the existence of a queer community, access to greyhound people and events, and then the idea that if I want to become more of a writer there might be opportunities there that otherwise would be mostly limited to larger cities (and I don't want to live in a big city, I'm pretty sure, even if it would increase my social opportunities). No answers yet, but I do think about this place issue almost daily.

Well, even while I am here in Waterloo, I'm still excited that this new resource exists and glad I'm diving in quickly to experience something there. Of all their winter and spring workshops I have been reading notices for, this feels like the one most suited to me at this stage. I have already dipped a toe into the Writers' Rooms, subcommunities that the Writer's House set up, and hope to explore further.