A writer’s most primary skill is the skill of paying attention. We pay close attention to people, to language, to our own feelings and the feelings and actions of others. Having full access to the information that comes to us through our five senses keeps us fully engaged in the creative flow. In this workshop, held in a beautiful outdoor/indoor setting on Walnut Ridge Farm in Wilson County, we will tune our bodies to be receptive to our senses, focusing on translating the things our bodies know into language. Every breeze is an elegy, every scent a memory. We will touch, taste, hear. see and smell our way into new stories.
Schedule:
10:00 -10:30 Introductions and Goal Setting
10:30-11:00 Exploring writing that is alive to the senses.
11:00-12:00 Focus on tuning in to our senses through exercises and prompts
12:00-1:00 Time for wandering on the farm: find a spot in the woods, in the pastures, or on one of the porches and see what the environment is saying to you through your senses. Write a short essay or poem.
1:00-1:45 Lunch (catered by Wildberry Café)
1:45-2:45 Sharing of what participants have written and discovered.
2:45-3:00 Wrap-up and next steps for participants
Cynthia Ezell, LMFT, MFA is a writer, psychotherapist, and farmer, depending on which day you run into her. She has incorporated writing into her clinical practice, and incorporated her clinical practice into her writing, and the farmer in her informs all her pursuits. She graduated from the New Directions Program in Writing and Psychoanalysis in 2009, and received her MFA from Spalding University in 2019. Her writing has appeared in publications like Chapter 16, Fourth Genre, Deep Wild, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.
Cynthia is new to The Porch. Welcome!
