A weekend and a 4-week generative writing workshop

Santa Sabina Retreat Center

April 20-23, 2023

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Your Archive of the Unspoken: 

A retreat for writing with Kim Stafford

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“As you grow older,” my astrologer said, “you will grow younger—closer to your essential self.” Fine, I thought, but how? My answer has been to seek my essential self by writing texts that bring forth what this life has hidden in me. At Santa Sabina, we will survey what has indelibly remained in memory, what Seamus Heaney calls those orphan recollections mysteriously illuminated in a spot of light, waiting for us to tell their story.

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Details and registration for this retreat will appear here soon:

https://www.santasabinacenter.org/programs-list

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Fishtrap Writers Gathering

July 10-15, 2023

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Personal Geology – A multi-genre workshop

       for revealing mysteries from below the surface.

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In the history of stone there is an era, a stratum, a fossil—subduction, fissure, fault. In the history of a life, too, there are these facts of accumulation, compression, and catastrophic change. In our workshop, we will delve into memory by the portal of imagination to bring home fragmentary specimens that litter the ground once we go looking. Writing in response to prompts, and sharing work in progress, we will assemble a museum of rich beginnings in poetry, prose, song, blessing, manifesto, and other forms. 

 

               Personal Geology

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I had my sedimentary era—didn’t you?

Years of accumulation left recollections settling 

in layers until the ground of my existence

stood deep with mystic hoardings.

 

Then came the igneous events of broken bond,

kin death, catastrophes of betrayal and grief 

by which all bubbled open so melted certainties 

could run like rivers from my depths.

 

Then metamorphosis crushed it all, tilted it, 

wrinkled, buckled, made it dense and strange.

Deep in my strata faults shifted, crystals formed, 

mountains rose by the subduction of the forgotten.

 

Now I am sandstone, schist, basalt. I am 

weathered by trouble, eroded by age. Now 

bring me rain to pare away the superficial.

Now reveal my museum of mysteries.

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Details and registration for this workshoo will appear here soon:

https://fishtrap.org/stafford/

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Orion Online Workshops

Spring 2024

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Earth Verse II

details available by fall 2023 here:

https://orionmagazine.org/events/category/online-writers-workshop/

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