Stories with Spirit: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice // with Regi Carpenter

"Art is a prayer... a fresh vital discovery of one's own special presence in the world." Peter London

At the heart of one's creativity lies a desire to explore and express the exquisite power of the present experience, feeling, sensation and belief. This class will focus on strengthening and recognizing the intuitive sense of the creative process without judgment or restriction. We’ll play with writing meditations, reflections, and written and spoken word pieces that gently guide us to who we are now, in this moment.

Through writing meditations, personal reflections, readings, videos and on-line shared discussions, we will explore how our creativity brings us into the present by bearing witness to the sacred within one another, the world and ourselves.  

We'll focus on the use of images, metaphors, ritual, voice, and a variety of writing structures to create vivid pieces in and outside of class. Beginning and experienced writers in any genre are welcome!

Week by Week

Week 1: Be Here, Now

In this first week we learn to listen to the exquisite self and world and write witness to both pain and beauty.

Week 2: The Poetics of the Impassioned Present

The second week takes us into the past to reclaim our silenced voices by working with images, feelings and sounds.

Week 3: Don’t Think, Just Go

Week three uses short writing “bursts” and prompts to trace a trail of where we’ve been and how it brought us to where we are now.

Week 4: I Said NO!

This weeks brings us to the awareness of who we are and aren’t. We use the paradoxes, contradictions, confusion and compromises that may have marked our lives to find fresh meaning and expression to the tensions of life.

Week 5: Communal Voices

Sharing our voices and our writings in a conference call.

Week 6: Pick Up the Pen

This final week shows us that we become who we are by picking up the pen. We’ll focus on strategies and exercises that will focus and refresh you to your complicated exultant self.

Who Should Take This Class

Writers, spoken-word artists/storytellers, anyone interested in playing with the concept of poetic or narrative sharing and its connection to personal knowledge and growth.

Format

This is an online class. Each week, a new week will open full of resources, reflections, discussion questions, and writing prompts. Students should expect to spend 3-5 hours per week perusing resources and readings, answering a discussion question, engaging in several writing prompts, and responding to peers’ work. From our interactions, we sustain a welcoming and inspiring community together.

About the Teacher

For over twenty years Regi Carpenter has been bringing songs and stories to audiences of all ages throughout the world in school, theaters, libraries, at festivals, conferences and in people’s back yards. An award winning performer, Regi has toured her solo shows and workshops in theaters, festivals and schools, nationally and internationally.

Regi is the youngest daughter in a family that pulsates with contradictions: religious and raucous, tender but terrible, unfortunate yet irrepressible. These tales celebrate the glorious and gut – wrenching lives of four generations of Carpenter s raised on the Saint Lawrence River in Clayton, New York. Tales of underwater tea parties, drowning lessons and drives to the dump give voice to multi-generations of family life in a small river town with an undercurrent.