Let us be honest: A New Directions in Writing Workshop, Pentagon City, VA

Because the program intrigues me, because I believe good things can happen when like-minded people gather around a table to think about the past and what it means, I said yes to Kerry Malawista when she kindly invited me to conduct a full-day workshop on behalf of New Directions next spring.

We'll focus on senses—not just what we see, taste hear, smell, touch, but the power of heat and its absence, the causeways of pain, the prerequisites of balance and bodily awareness. I'll share the works of favorite poets and memoirists, launch small exercises, listen carefully to the emergent memories, help shape them.

Each participant will move, throughout the day, toward a single, honest, well-rendered moment—a memory that lives rightly on the page. We will, together, build a community. We'll reflect on some of the memoirs I discuss in Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, and why they are essential to a writing life; we'll reflect on some brand-new titles, too.

A handful of personal critique sessions on manuscripts-in-progress will be offered during breaks. 

If any of you are interested in participating, please leave a comment or send a note. I'll have more information shortly. For now:

Let us be honest: A Memoir Workshop
New Directions in Writing
http://newdirectionsinwriting.com
Residence Inn, Pentagon City, VA
April 23, 2014
9:00-5:00

 More on New Directions in Writing:

 . . . an innovative three-year postgraduate training program for writers, clinicians, and academics who want to develop their skill in writing with a psychological perspective.  We have been of help to  students who were novice writers and to others who were well-published authors, and to all those in-between.  While most of our students have been psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists, our student bodies have also included journalists, authors, and university faculty, among others.

In seasonal weekend conferences and optional summer and winter retreats, our community of students, alumni, teachers, and guest faculty come together to explore topics of psychological interest which stimulate our minds and enrich our writing.  Each weekend has a specific topic focus, such as memory, play, trauma, gender, writers block, mourning, revenge and forgiveness, religion, boundary, children’s literature, evil, the body, music, neuroscience, projection, and imagining a life.

Writing helps us to think. Thinking helps us to write. But writing is the focus of the program.