Grackle artwork by artist Monica Opincariu
“The best time to begin keeping a journal is whenever you decide to.”
— Hannah Hinchman, A Life In Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal
“I am anxious, and it soothes me to express myself here. It is like whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time.”
— Mina Murray’s journal entry from Bram Stoker’s Dracula
In this workshop, all of your journaling impulses are welcome. 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 will create journals full of lists and drawings, ideas and questions, quotations and poems. Anecdotes from your life will be dolloped in, along with images from your dream brain and strings of words you don’t want to forget the sound of. You might find a style you want to stick to. You might fill your pages with words you’ll never utter aloud, but can’t move on without expressing. You might try to make yourself laugh.
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, 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.