Do you ever feel like your writing or even ‘freewriting’ tends to result in the same kinds of language, or similar kinds of stories that move in similar directions? Are you struggling with ideas that never seem to get beyond a certain point? Our brain is designed to become creatively fixed, and to follow the specific patterns and connections it has established in the past. This dynamic and explorative class is designed to help you break out of those patterns and shake up your writing practice whilst strengthening your authentic writing voice.
Using a mix of somatic techniques, games of chance, restructuring of craft, memory work, and elements of play, we’ll generate new work, scenes, and language in order to unshackle our ideas from limiting frameworks and discover new pathways into storytelling. By rerouting our synapses and being open to possibility we’ll find new expansive entries into our stories, channel clarity, explore emergent structure, and effortlessly take new risks. In this two-day weekend retreat, we’ll first play with fresh approaches towards creative discovery and later delve into deep editing as a form of creation.
On day one, we’ll generate new work. The approaches taught here will provide a grab bag of tools, which you will be able to use at any time when writing alone. Tools for starting new projects, leaning into new voices, orienting in unwritten scenes, and revisiting memories. We’ll work with the inertia of our own curiosity, learning a variety of straightforward practices designed to help us through blocks, boredom, and limitations.
Day two will be dedicated to revisiting pre-existing work in various new ways, discovering new tactics to break into prose and refresh the potential held within, while keeping the integrity of initial urgency.
This workshop is open to all levels, and all genres, be that fiction, non-fiction, poetry or if you just want to experiment with writing. Brand new and experienced writers are equally encouraged.
*If you don’t have pre-existing work for day two, the exercises can be applied to the work generated in day one*
*Since Leah will be running the workshop from New York, it will be taking place over the course of the weekend for two and a half hours each day.
Email us at hello@thereaderberlin.com to sign up!
Leah Dworkin is a writer based in New York City. Her writing practice combines her interests: visual art and oral storytelling, holistic eating and food intuition, music and sonics, memory, dreamwork, movement, mysticism, somatics and magic. Her stories have been published in Fence, BOMB, Hotel, LitroUS, Best American Experimental and elsewhere. She’s worked as an associate editor at Conjunctions and is currently the editor for the Manhattan anthology for Dostoyevsky Wannabe. She works as a freelance editor, and loves editing all varieties of manuscripts, essays and short stories. She also writes literary criticism and has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. You can see more of her work on her website at leahsophiadworkin.com or follow her online @frumperella.
