Awakening the Senses: A Writing Workshop
How will your writing transform if you choose to write using all your senses? This writing workshop series invites you to embark on a magical journey to awaken your senses, unleash your creativity and infuse life into your writing. Here are six workshop sessions designed to deepen your relationship with your writing.
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Awakening the Senses: Touch
What if we were robbed of all senses but one: the sense of touch? How would our fingers describe a clump of wildflowers, a mother's cornflower blue dress, the pebbles on a beach, a blanket, a lover's hips, the feverish temple of a young child, or the leaping shadows on a wall? In this workshop session, we will focus on the sense of touch to write more penetratingly about our ordinary and simultaneously extraordinary lives.
What to bring: Writing tools. Curiosity. Adventurous spirit.
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Awakening the Senses: Sight
What if we let go of the way we see the world through our visible eyes to bring into focus the invisible worlds waiting to unfurl before us? How would we see and write about an artichoke or the ants crawling between the cracks of a sidewalk? What worlds wait in our coffee cups? What stories are written on our father's back, or the stony gaze of a subway rider? In this workshop, let's feast on images! As we do so, we will move between the visible and the invisible world to bring back searing images to write sentences that are electric and that crackle with life.
What to bring: Writing tools. Vulnerability. Courage.
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Awakening the Senses: Sound
Sounds can move us, soothe us, hurt us, or tease us. Sounds, so seemingly simple, are chock-full of meanings. Spiritual practices use sounds to awaken the soul: gongs, bells, chants. Listening deeply to the sounds of nature, of city landscape, or of our own bodies allow us to tap into a powerful source where creative ideas surface. In this workshop, we will rely on sounds to carry us to a distance we have not dared to travel on our own. Along the way, we will come back to the page to give words to wordless experiences.
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Awakening the Senses: Taste
Tongue. Fleshy, muscular, wet. We use it to roll the pit of a fruit or push out words from the back of our throats. In this workshop, we will awaken the sense of taste to feast on our life experiences and write from a satiated state! Will the stories be sweet, salty, bitter or savory? Let's find out!
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Awakening the Senses: Smell
The sense of smell is so powerful that it can conjure up memories that we forgot we had. For example, prickling the skin of a lemon can transport us to a night that changed the course of our life. Or we can think of our grandmother who massaged her hair with coconut oil two decades ago when we catch a whiff of this scent. In this workshop, we will awaken our sense of smell to access memories frolicking on the surface or lodged deep inside us. Here is the question: Do you dare to unlock the vaults of your memory and see what stories you meet on the page?
