With a very pleasant structure, these Contemplative Writing Sessions allow writers, both emerging and published to practice spontaneous writing in an informal setting and talk about their experiences with both writing and publishing. Most people who participate in these types of sessions have already been writing private journals and some have published a little bit. A series of writing support sessions like this is easy to recreate in any community.
The Process
After some informal exchanges about recent events in the writers' lives, along with a vegetarian dinner that is sometimes lavish and sometimes sparse, the writers choose to move ahead and discuss whatever goals they may have in mind in terms of publishing. They take turns reading aloud some of the online excerpts from those pieces that other writers have successfully published.
Topics in publications include: The Office, Paying Attention, Slowing Down, Fights, Teenage Years, etc. Excerpts from contemplative writing books, such as Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones," include "Writing as a Communal Act," "Reading Aloud," and "First Thoughts."
The Exercises
Examples of contemplative, spontaneous and brief writing exercises can come from Natalie Goldberg and the many various authors who contributed to Robin Behn's and Chase Twichell's collection of suggested exercises, "The Practice of Poetry." The authors used in the latter volume include Deborah Digges, who titled her animal description exercise "Evolutions," and Richard Jackson, with more of a fiction and metaphor-devising exercise named "Five Easy Pieces."
The Responses
The 10-minute automatic writing time seems very comfortable for these writers. Some have written about childhood memories, others have become very philosophical and written about the Buddha or recreated parables with clear wisdom attached. Another very emotional example came when someone shared memories of a mother in Pakistan and someone else described a hospital visit with a close cancer-stricken relative.
The animal descriptions made everything very concrete, with one author writing about an eagle, another giving a stream of consciousness about an elephant, another about a tiger, and another about a kitten being rehabilitated in the writers' home.
Communications
At times, the writers send group or individual messages to each other about publishing ideas and projects, as well as grant proposal opportunities.
Coordinators of groups like these can encourage writers to post the products from each session online, with different web-sourced pictures as illustrations. Writers have the opportunity to respond to each other's work between sessions, by posting notes to one another and to the general public that contain their responses to the exercises along with relevant illustrations, as well as comments on each other's postings.
Both visual and verbal rhetoric have places in contemplative writing. If this format can promote healing for various issues writers confront in their lives, so much the better. If not, it can serve as simply an informal, healthy and friendly way to share the writing experience and encourage mutual support and collaboration.
Elizabeth Herman - Elizabeth Herman (Betsy) recently completed a doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition. Her dissertation research investigated possible ...
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