Hope to see you all here
37776 2nd Ave
Squamish
7:00 - 9:00 pm
May 23, Wednesday
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
May's Writing Assignment
Another Assignment from Adrian Juric
You’ve just moved into a new house and are fixing it up. In the process of painting you find an odd crack in the wall. As you explore further, you find out it’s a secret passageway—and you have no idea where it leads. You decide to grab a flashlight and go exploring. What you find changes your life forever.
Our next meeting will be May 23
More information soon!
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Meeting tomorrow night!
Sorry, hope you all know tomorrow is our regular monthly writers meeting
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Wednesday April 18
3rd wednesday of the month
and hope you all bring your assignment - great challenge!
See you there
37776 2nd Ave
Squamish BC
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Wednesday April 18
3rd wednesday of the month
and hope you all bring your assignment - great challenge!
See you there
37776 2nd Ave
Squamish BC
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
April Assignment
All writers are invited to enjoy our April Assignment submitted by Adrian Juric. We'll be reading our responses to the assignment during our April Writers Group Meeting.
Knowing Your Element
I was walking with a friend in Stanley Park the other day. She was struggling with a major life decision, and I thought we could do worse than to follow the advice of the poet Wallace Stevens, who said that sometimes the truth depends upon a good walk around the lake.
When we arrived at the pond we found two swans – young ones – resting and preening their feathers on the grassy shore. Regal, and clearly used to regular handouts of food, they basked contentedly in the sun.
Suddenly, from down the beach, a young chocolate lab came hurtling in to harass them. Off-leash and quivering with excitement, he cut them off before they could reach the safety of water, driving them up further up the grassy slope. Panicked and out of their element, the distressed birds lurched and flapped and stumbled, snapping in vain at their more agile opponent.
The spectacle came to a rapid close when the dog’s red-faced owner burst into view, two toddlers in tow. The geese wobbled gratefully back to the water, where they sped off with impressive grace and speed.
I didn’t think much of the event at the time. It must have made a deep impression on my friend, though, who called me later that evening to say she finally realized what she needed to do for herself.
“I need to go back to the element where I belong,” she said.
Which reminds me of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that will set the stage for our next writing assignment.
The Swan
This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.
And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.
Rilke’s poem is about the journey we are all on, the journey back to the element where we truly belong.
Write a commencement address of one or two pages for a graduating class at a university. In your address, touch on one more of these themes:
· A time in your personal, professional, or spiritual life when you felt profoundly ‘out of your element’. Was there an awkward, ‘lumbering’, quality to it?
· An event that brought you to this realization.
· The way you felt and lived in the world after you found, and entered, your element.
· Your advice to students about how to live life
Monday, March 19, 2012
ALERT : Date Change
Hello everyone
We are changing the date for this week's writers meeting to next week due to Spring Break.
MARCH 28th
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Goodwin Studios Building
37776 2nd Ave
Wheel chair friendly
See previous post for information regarding the Assignment
Sorry for late notice, just didn't realize we were scheduled over Spring Break
Regards,
Jude Goodwin
We are changing the date for this week's writers meeting to next week due to Spring Break.
MARCH 28th
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Goodwin Studios Building
37776 2nd Ave
Wheel chair friendly
See previous post for information regarding the Assignment
Sorry for late notice, just didn't realize we were scheduled over Spring Break
Regards,
Jude Goodwin
Monday, March 5, 2012
March Assignment
Next meeting will be Wednesday March 21 (traditionally the 3rd march of each month)
Here is Margreet Dietz' assignment, bring it a long when you come!
March assignment
By Margreet Dietz
Recently I've been thinking a lot about, well, thinking.
In one book about writing fiction, I believe it was Elizabeth George's Write Away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, the author recommends reading up on psychology to help develop your characters. I was drawn to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, both of which I have almost finished reading.
The main insight I take away from both books is that much of our knowledge is stored in places in our mind—or indeed elsewhere in the body—we are not conscious of. We have ready access to these places when needed, and when we are open to them.
"One of the enduring paradoxes of the human mind is that it doesn't know itself very well. The conscious brain is ignorant of its own underpinnings... This is why people have emotions: they are windows into the unconscious, visceral representations of all the information we process but don't perceive," writes Lehrer.
Our brain is in a constant state of battle, as there is continuous adjustment of our knowledge—conscious and unconscious, based on our experiences. We are weighing the pros and cons, what's true and what's not, on an ongoing basis. When we feel conflicted, it is an accurate reflection of our state of mind. When we feel convinced, one side has won— at least for the moment, because it doesn't always mean the other side of the argument has gone away.
"It doesn't matter if your field of expertise is backgammon or Middle East politics, golf or computer programming: the brain always learns the same way, accumulating wisdom through error," says Lehrer.
When you write about what matters to you now, you soon end up writing about your life; decisions about what to include and what to leave out, how to say what, who to tell it to and why, can take another lifetime if you're not careful.
Many times I've told the story of my start as a runner. To tell it, I choose to explain how and why I quit my first real job, moved countries and began a postgraduate degree in a field in which I was not familiar.
"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it," Gabriel Garcia Marquez says in the epigraph of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Writing about your life can be powerful, therapeutic, as we begin to see past experiences in a new light—that of the present. The most interesting point about the way we relive our memories today is how we view them, and how our view of them, changes over time as we change.
Write, now, a 250-word stream-of-consciousness postcard story about your life. You can return to this first draft later if you like, as there's a second part to the exercise.
Sometimes we can get stuck in, or too serious about, the stories of the past as we put ourselves in a context which we don't deserve to be. In her essay Street Haunting, Virginia Woolf wrote about the joys of leaving the house for a solitary walk through evening London, shedding the self others know us by.
The context in which others know us—the way we relate to ourselves in our familiar environments—can be confining. Stepping out of the usual frame of reference that keeps us prisoner to a certain self, even though safely housed and well fed, can be liberating.
Once you have a draft of the first postcard story, go for a short (or long) solitary exploration: walk, run, or ride, or take the bus through town. No errands, just take the time to let your body and mind wander on a trip that's otherwise 'pointless'.
In Thinking About Memoir, Abigail Thomas writes, "Memory seems to be an independent creature inspired by events, not faithful to it. Maybe memory is what the mind does with its free time, decorating itself. Maybe it's the cave paintings. The thing is, I'm old enough now to enough to know that the past is every bit as unpredictable as the future, and that memory, mine anyway, is not a faithful record of anything and truth is not absolute."
Truth is far from absolute, especially our personal truth. The way we choose the elements we share about our life, the same exact life, can paint an entirely different picture—to ourselves, and to others.
Eckhart Tolle writes in Stillness Speaks, "The human mind, in its desire to know, understand, and control, mistakes its opinion, and viewpoints for the truth. It says: this is how it is. You have to be larger than thought to realize that however you interpret 'your life' or someone else's life or behaviour, however you judge any situation, it is no more than a viewpoint, one of many more possible perspectives. It is no more than a bundle of thoughts. But reality is one unified whole, in which all things are interwoven, where nothing exists in and by itself. Thinking fragments reality—it cuts it up in to conceptual bits and pieces."
"The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are," Tolle writes.
Shake up those bits and pieces a little before you write another 250-word postcard story about your life as you opt for a different viewpoint.
Here is Margreet Dietz' assignment, bring it a long when you come!
March assignment
By Margreet Dietz
Recently I've been thinking a lot about, well, thinking.
In one book about writing fiction, I believe it was Elizabeth George's Write Away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, the author recommends reading up on psychology to help develop your characters. I was drawn to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, both of which I have almost finished reading.
The main insight I take away from both books is that much of our knowledge is stored in places in our mind—or indeed elsewhere in the body—we are not conscious of. We have ready access to these places when needed, and when we are open to them.
"One of the enduring paradoxes of the human mind is that it doesn't know itself very well. The conscious brain is ignorant of its own underpinnings... This is why people have emotions: they are windows into the unconscious, visceral representations of all the information we process but don't perceive," writes Lehrer.
Our brain is in a constant state of battle, as there is continuous adjustment of our knowledge—conscious and unconscious, based on our experiences. We are weighing the pros and cons, what's true and what's not, on an ongoing basis. When we feel conflicted, it is an accurate reflection of our state of mind. When we feel convinced, one side has won— at least for the moment, because it doesn't always mean the other side of the argument has gone away.
"It doesn't matter if your field of expertise is backgammon or Middle East politics, golf or computer programming: the brain always learns the same way, accumulating wisdom through error," says Lehrer.
When you write about what matters to you now, you soon end up writing about your life; decisions about what to include and what to leave out, how to say what, who to tell it to and why, can take another lifetime if you're not careful.
Many times I've told the story of my start as a runner. To tell it, I choose to explain how and why I quit my first real job, moved countries and began a postgraduate degree in a field in which I was not familiar.
"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it," Gabriel Garcia Marquez says in the epigraph of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Writing about your life can be powerful, therapeutic, as we begin to see past experiences in a new light—that of the present. The most interesting point about the way we relive our memories today is how we view them, and how our view of them, changes over time as we change.
Write, now, a 250-word stream-of-consciousness postcard story about your life. You can return to this first draft later if you like, as there's a second part to the exercise.
Sometimes we can get stuck in, or too serious about, the stories of the past as we put ourselves in a context which we don't deserve to be. In her essay Street Haunting, Virginia Woolf wrote about the joys of leaving the house for a solitary walk through evening London, shedding the self others know us by.
The context in which others know us—the way we relate to ourselves in our familiar environments—can be confining. Stepping out of the usual frame of reference that keeps us prisoner to a certain self, even though safely housed and well fed, can be liberating.
Once you have a draft of the first postcard story, go for a short (or long) solitary exploration: walk, run, or ride, or take the bus through town. No errands, just take the time to let your body and mind wander on a trip that's otherwise 'pointless'.
In Thinking About Memoir, Abigail Thomas writes, "Memory seems to be an independent creature inspired by events, not faithful to it. Maybe memory is what the mind does with its free time, decorating itself. Maybe it's the cave paintings. The thing is, I'm old enough now to enough to know that the past is every bit as unpredictable as the future, and that memory, mine anyway, is not a faithful record of anything and truth is not absolute."
Truth is far from absolute, especially our personal truth. The way we choose the elements we share about our life, the same exact life, can paint an entirely different picture—to ourselves, and to others.
Eckhart Tolle writes in Stillness Speaks, "The human mind, in its desire to know, understand, and control, mistakes its opinion, and viewpoints for the truth. It says: this is how it is. You have to be larger than thought to realize that however you interpret 'your life' or someone else's life or behaviour, however you judge any situation, it is no more than a viewpoint, one of many more possible perspectives. It is no more than a bundle of thoughts. But reality is one unified whole, in which all things are interwoven, where nothing exists in and by itself. Thinking fragments reality—it cuts it up in to conceptual bits and pieces."
"The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are," Tolle writes.
Shake up those bits and pieces a little before you write another 250-word postcard story about your life as you opt for a different viewpoint.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
February Update
We had a great meeting last night. The assignment was a 250 word 'postcard' story - and the On The Spot Challenge (Table Topic) was "Do you agree with same sex marriage and why."
We talked a bit about putting up some of the responses to assignments and challenges on this blog. Watch for a new page, coming soon.
Next month's meeting will be the third Wednesday in March, 7:00 - 9:00 pm, Goodwin Studios building on 2nd avenue. (37776 2nd). I'll post a notice when we get closer.
Margreet Dietz will be devising an 'assignment' for us and Jude Goodwin will have a Table Topic. Riun Blackwell will be chair.
See you then!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)