A few days ago my friend Lindsay Wolff inquired if I was doing a writing class this fall. Giving it some thought, I decided to offer the following just because I thought it could be (1) a fun refresher and (2) a way to acknowledge my many teachers. Each week we will address a theme, practice or prompt such as the following—
- All-Time Greats—Writers we love
- Anaphora
- “Appreciation is the sacrament.” —Allen Ginsberg
- Commonplace Book: Like Thoreau and Emerson of Old
- DIY
- “Don’t Be Swayed by External Circumstances”—Buddhist lojong
- Equality Practice: “Just like me, you want to be happy, you don’t want to suffer.”
- Face of the Other—Emmanuel Levinas
- First Thoughts—Natalie Goldberg
- The Good News—Nhat Hanh
- Gratitudes—Mev Puleo
- “I gave an onion.”—Grushenka, The Brothers Karamazov
- “I Remember”—Joe Brainard
- “If not now, when?”—Rabbi Hillel
- “Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”—Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”
- Lists
- Logophilia—Keeping a glossary
- Microscopic Actions
- Multitudes— Walt Whitman
- Naikan—The Inexhaustible 3 Questions of the Japanese
- Reading Oneself
- Remembering the Dead
- “Scribbled secret notebooks and wild typewritten pages for your own joy”—Jack Kerouac
- Share the Wealth (You know what you get to do)
- “Someday we’ll be together”—Diana Ross and the Supremes
- Tags
- Texts, Emails, Postcards, Letters
- Tsuris: Yiddish, noun, “serious difficulty,” A. Ginsberg
- Using Incense—Diane di Prima
- “We can be heroes”—David Bowie
Details to come soon!
