Grackle artwork by artist Monica Opincariu
“Let me keep my mind on what matters which is my work which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”
― Mary Oliver
“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”
―
In this workshop, our journaling prompts and ideas will be inspired by the natural world. It is an online class, which means you might join us from anywhere — your home, your National Park, the gully down the street. You can attend from anywhere you wish that has wifi!
We will collect leaves and draw birds, we will listen to trees. Our writing prompts will hit the major genres, and include some cartooning, some tiny plays. We will diagram and count, we will delve into our memories. We will interrogate the weather, invent new species, and observe. We will create journals full of lists and drawings, ideas and questions, quotations and poems.
Whether you are in the middle of a large writing project in search of inspiration, or you haven’t written a word since high school English class and want to start up again, or you just want to follow the loose trails in your brain and see where they lead you, this class is a blank page waiting. We will draw, write, list, question in community with each other. I’ll bring in a few very short in-class prompts every week. We’ll create and we’ll share (if you choose), think and respond.
We won’t critique each other’s writing in a workshop, this is a class devoted to creation, questioning, discovery, and creating in community.
Miah Arnold
Miah Arnold, PhD, is the director of Grackle and Grackle. She has taught creative writing for the past twenty years through Houston non-profits including Inprint, Writers in the Schools, and Aurora Picture Show as well as University of Houston, University of Houston-Downtown, Houston Community College, and Georgia College. Her essay “You Owe Me” about working for M.D. Anderson via Writers in the Schools was selected by Best American Essays in 2012. Her first novel, Sweet Land of Bigamy, was published in 2012.