Write of Passage Workshop at 1506 Burnside Road, Victoria, Sunday Nov. 3rd, 10 AM to 3PM. Lunch included. Cost $89 and lower, if needed, by request.
So happy to be leading this writing time in Victoria this coming Sunday. One or two spots still available. This time will be ideally suited for men and women searching for ways to support their recovery from addiction. And also others who want to to recover their own hidden and waiting words. Who want to experience poetry as described by the esteemed American poet Jane Hirschfield who needs a poem like life! Her journey of falling into poetry and being held by words, by the poem:
When I start to write, I’m not a guide or teacher; I’m not even a poet. I’m a person far out at sea, and the poem is a raft made of whatever floats past in the water. Those almost accidental rescuing pieces are words, rhythms, musics, ideas, the memory that is mine and the memory that is all of ours and the memory that is held in language itself. The experience of writing, for me at least, isn’t confidence or wisdom; it’s closer to desperation. You are naked as Odysseus when he’s lost his ship and all his men, before he’s met by the courageous young girl Nausicaa—a version perhaps of the rescuing muse, who helps us find our way back into the world shared with others but only if we bring our own resourcefulness to the situation as well. There is some faint memory that this raft business has worked before, some memory of knot-tying, of the intention to live. There is that in us that recognizes: “this is water; this is land.” A poem is land found, as if for the first time. If I already knew what it would hold, I wouldn’t need the poem, and if what it holds were knowable by any other words or way, I wouldn’t need the poem.
Jane Hirschfield in Conversation with author Kim Rosen, May 23rd, 2013