Shaping Words: A One-Day Writing Workshop
This condensed, intensive class is designed to introduce participants to a number of advanced writing skills and give them exercises they can work on at home to help themselves grow as powerful, artful writers. The morning session: Participants learn artful prose rhythms that catch the attention of readers and listeners and lend power to prose. The afternoon session: Participants focus on metaphor - those images that give shape to ideas and that make thoughts comprehensible and memorable. Emphasis will be on controlling metaphor and metaphor extension.
Cost: $400 plus travel and other direct expenses. This price includes a 60-page course packet for each participant containing instruction, exercises, and many examples of the various literary techniques.
Questions?
Call: 1-800-886-2777
Or email: maryenilsen@aol.com
Creating and Using Christian Blessing Rituals: A Two-Day Workshop
A Blessing ritual is a time when an individual, family, or group intentionally invites and celebrates God's presence in the ordinary and extraordinary events of their lives. Such intentionality is a key factor in the faith formation of children and in deepening the faith of adults.
During these two days participants will experience rituals, explore the possible components of a blessing ritual and practice advanced writing skills including prose rhythms and metaphor extension. Next, participants will be encouraged to choose a subject, write, share, and discuss the first draft of a ritual. Such discussion will deepen and expand their vision of the flexibility, usefulness, and power of blessing rituals. After discovering how such rituals help in faith formation, partipants will share ideas on how they can work to create a climate of blessing in their own families and among the members of their congregations.
Cost: $600 plus travel and other direct expenses. This price includes a course packet for each participant containing instruction, exercises, and examples of the various literary techniques.
Questions?
Call: 1-800-886-2777
Or email: maryenilsen@aol.com
Five-Day Classes:
(Four hours of class a day with time for assigned writing between classes)
1. "Prose Rhythms, Memorable Images: Writing craft for Sermons, Prayers, Liturgies, and Blessing Rituals"
Powerful writing - writing that touches and changes the hearts and minds of readers and listeners'is 90% craft. And craft is teachable and learnable. This week will be spent working on two different writing crafts. First, participants will to learn to write various prose rhythms so their words catch the reader's attention and the rhythms add to rather than detract from the point they are making. A second focus will be on learning techniques for setting up clear images or metaphors and extending them through subtle use of language throughout their work.
Each day, participants will learn a specific craft, and then practice that craft by writing a short homily, prayer, liturgy, or ritual. These writings will be workshopped the next day - a process that allows everyone in the group to learn and grow from the strengths and weaknesses in the writing of all participants.
Cost: $2000 plus travel and other direct expenses. This price includes a course packet for each participant containing instruction, exercises, and many examples of the various literary techniques.
Questions?
Call: 1-800-886-2777
Or email: maryenilsen@aol.com
2. Metaphors We Live By, Think By, Write By
Metaphor is more than a literary flourish or a fresh comparison. All human thought processes and conceptual systems are metaphorical in nature. Language, the working material of a writer, is an incredibly intricate web of words with metaphoric roots and of definitions of one thing in terms of another. As writers and thinkers, unchallenged metaphors control us, hidden metaphors sabotage us, overused metaphors bore us, and true metaphors rise up out of our subconscious to direct and empower our writing.
The week will be spent exploring the reality of metaphorical thinking and how participants can make the ever-present images in their writing work for them and not against them,. Through in-class exercises and overnight assignments, participants will learn to work with simple metaphor, complete metaphor, controlling metaphor, analogy, and extended metaphor.
Whether their form is poetry or fiction, literary non-fiction or sermons, this attention to the images imbedded in writing will bring new clarity, focus, and power to their work.
Cost: $2000 plus travel and other direct expenses. This price includes a course packet for each participant containing instruction, exercises, and many examples of the various literary techniques.
Questions?
Call: 1-800-886-2777
Or email: maryenilsen@aol.com
3. Prose Style: Sentence Rhythms
Pianists practice scales. Artists study for years, experimenting with color, perspective, design. And writers? Many writers just write and write and write, thinking there is something magical about the act itself that produces a good writer. But good writing is 90% craft-learning literary skills, and then practicing, practicing, practicing.
The week will be spent focusing on some of the sophisticated elements of sentence style that set literary writing apart from competent prose writing and one writer apart from another. Artful sentences are those sentences that through their particular form strengthen the power of the thought.
Each day a particular form will be taught (the balanced, the series, the cumulative, and the suspended sentence) and examples of it in published prose studied. In addition class participants will work on in-class exercises to help them hone the skill. Overnight they will write a mini-essay using that sentence form, which will be workshopped the next day. Through this sharing, participants will develop both that particular skill and an ear to hear it in the writing of others. By the end of the week, participants will have four new tools in their writing toolbox, ready to be used when needed in their writing.
Cost: $2000 plus travel and other direct expenses. This price includes a course packet for each participant containing instruction, exercises, and many examples of the various literary techniques.
Questions?
Call: 1-800-886-2777
Or email: maryenilsen@aol.com
4. Drawing With Words the People You Know
A camera or a paintbrush, even in the hands of a superb artist, can only tell us some things about a person. Our words have much greater flexibility, and in the hands of an artist can give us a multi-dimensional picture of both the subject of the portrait and of the person doing the writing. The subject could be a parent or a grandparent, or perhaps a child, grandchild, neighbor or friend. It might be someone we respect, or maybe someone who has been very problematic to us. Or both.
During the week, participants will read portraits others have written and workshop what they write, working particularly on the skill of showing, not telling - learning to write sharp, gripping vignettes that reveal key characteristics and peccadilloes about their subject. In addition, they will learn to gather relevant data and present it in an interesting way. And finally, they will grapple with how best to present the complexities and paradoxes of human nature. Come ready to wrestle with the most interesting person in your life.
Cost: $2000 plus travel and other direct expenses. This price includes a course packet for each participant containing a number of personal portraits containing examples of various literary techniques.
Questions?
Call: 1-800-886-2777
Or email: maryenilsen@aol.com
5. Fiction in General, The Short Story in Particular
The writer and poet Mary Oliver says that writers "stand between two marvelous and complex things - an experience (or an idea, or a feeling [or a character]), and the urge to tell about it in the best possible conjunction of words." This course will stimulate the first, while focusing on the second-finding the best possible way to tell a story.
Early in the week participants will study several published short stories noting how fiction writers create and deepen their characters, shape their stories, use point of view, integrate foreshadowing and flashbacks, and layer their stories with metaphor. They will also work on several short exercises. The last days of the week will be spent workshopping early drafts of short stories written by participants.
Cost: $2000 plus travel and other direct expenses. This price includes a course packet for each participant containing information about the parts of a short story, exercises, and examples of various literary techniques.
Questions?
Call: 1-800-886-2777
Or email: maryenilsen@aol.com
6. By Your Letters They Will Know You
Somewhere, deep inside, we writers long to communicate something of ourselves so that others, separated from us by space or time, will know us, understand us, even treasure us through our words. For centuries writers have recognized that the personal letter, as an art form, has real power for doing just that. It contains our undiluted voice, our direct thoughts, the grit and joy of daily life, along with structured purpose and intentional audience.
Even in this age of harried lives, quick phone calls, and rushed emails, writers, more and more, are reclaiming the personal letter as an art form. This week participants will study a variety of artfully written letters, each designed to accomplish a particular task.
Participants will then work on a letter of their own choosing, bringing it to the group to be workshopped in terms of the literary skills they have learned. Of particular interest will be strengthening the voice of the writer, discovering and developing his/her point or truth, writing strong vignettes, and learning to use and extend metaphor.
Cost: $2000 plus travel and other direct expenses. This price includes a course packet for each participant containing published letters demonstrating various literary techniques.
Questions?
Call: 1-800-886-2777
Or email: maryenilsen@aol.com
