There will be a few opportunities during the course of the Amherst Writers and Artists Retreat to post pieces. This will serve as the place to drop those items. It is also ca chance to introduce you to the Forum, a great place for ideas, to seek advice, ask a question or, hopefully, contribute your two-cents to the inquiries and posts of others. We want this to be a robust venue, so help us out. We look forward to all that comes from this weekend.
Smart move guy! And indeed a great suggestion that people use this area as a way of staying in touch, sharing, or asking questions during this weekend. Enjoy a productive and inspiring retreat everyone!
Agreed Matthew! Bravo guy – a great way to introduce Affiliates to this resource.
Just a few of the things I love about AWA… I love the social justice commitment of AWA. I love that it is a community that is open to all and welcomes everyone. I love that people in AWA often extend the AWA ethos beyond their writing workshops and into many aspects of their lives. It is something I strive to do. I love what AWA has done for my writing and my writing practice. It has transformed the way that I write and approach writing. It is also the community where I have made what I know will be lifelong friends.
I am alive as I find AWA method guided me to name my care for the ethics of facilitating and offers a community for that care.
My hands are open with Pat Schneider’s quote from Rainer MariaRilke in her book Writing Alone with Others: ”
“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
As someone who just finished the AWA training, I found my heart so alive in this.
How we are aligned and find allies. As artists, meditators, warriors… How we hold and guard our solitudes as facilitators as we champion others’ work.
At the end of our AWA Training, Maureen shared with us about our authority. “Your authority comes from the AWA method.”
It’s been a relief to hold this feeling. To be backed up.
I love the recognition of the sacred duty of this work, as well as it’s joyousness and aliveness. Thank you, Chiu
The AWA commitment to the practice of listening differently demonstrates kindness and inclusion in action.
What I’m loving about my participation as a 1-year-old workshop leader is how the philosophy of equality and positivity and inclusion bring together practically everything I think and believe to be true. This is a humane human endeavor, so meaningful in its purpose, so thoughtful in its precision. And I appreciate that the organization is so forward thinking. How that just showed up for me is in the whole fiction vs. story distinction. I’ve been feeling how sort of awkward it is to tell my writers to consider everything they hear as fiction. The word “story” rings true for me, and maybe that’s why I think it will be simpler for me to outline how considering everything as being our stories will be more effective. We all have stories to tell. We can come to recognize that our stories, while perhaps memoir in nature, are our interpretations of what has happened in our lives and therefore relating it to others is our way of sharing ourselves. Also, I’ve witnessed my own and other people’s stories changing as we mature or come to understand the results of delving into them. We can actually rewrite, revise our stories, our very histories. This is all very exciting for me. I also love the element of simply witnessing each other, not to approve or change each other, but to bear witness to the humanity in each of us.
Loved this: I also love the element of simply witnessing each other, not to approve or change each other, but to bear witness to the humanity in each of us.
“A writer is someone who writes.” Yes. Yes! And an AWA writer is someone who moves their pen across the page, leaping from word to word, line to line, communing with the creative genius they were born with—all while holding space for all voices through deep listening and the power of echoing back what’s strong. Because words are strong. And when we write and take creative risks together in community, we become stronger, both alone and with others. We create what we could not have created on our own.
That, to me, is the power of AWA.
Loved: moves their pen across the page, leaping from word to word, line to line
Oct. 3. 25. Prompt: What is something that you love about the AWA affirmations/practices?
I am putting together my first writing group, using my recent facilitator training in August. I was telling a friend who is interested in signing up WHY she would like this way of writing and as I listed several pieces – the affirmations /principles are stated and agreed on, responses address the writing, not the writer – and she was connecting with these herself, I realized how I am so excited to be doing this. I have facilitated a number of of groups, creative and training focussed over the years. No other format comes close to this for allowing participants to engage in the practice and with each other, free of the fear of outside criticism and judgment as AWA workshops do. Getting to the heart of what I want to say as a writer isn’t easy for me. To open the portal to my creative goddess (there I said it!) inside me can be terrifying and to have the support and uplift of fellow writers who are also exploring and discovering along the way (including the leader) is very unique.
I feel that I have an opportunity to offer a valuable experience and have two types of groups to offer workshops to in mind.
Love the “creative goddess”
What do I love most about AWA? EVERY SINGLE ONE of the principles and practices of the Method. But that’s probably too abstract, so I’m going to focus on just two linked items from Mary’s list: it’s the principle that “Writing as an art form can be learned without damage to a writer’s original voice or artistic self-esteem,” and the practice “Craft is an integral part of the AWA workshop. Our responses are about the craft being used in the writing.” These two items from those lists maybe get the least fanfare, but over time I have seen them pay huge writerly dividends over and over. A writer can come into an AWA workshop with no history of being in writing workshops, no formal knowledge at all–just bringing your own original voice. Maybe “your kitchen table voice” as Pat loved to call it — ie, the voice you learned as a child at your family’s kitchen table. And through participating in the workshops – listening carefully to the other writers words, and then to the feedback that they get and the feedback you get, there’s an informal but powerful submersion in the many, many elements of craft. The strengths that your writing and your voice already have are celebrated, you begin to believe in the value of your own words and the way you write them. And then you begin to make more conscious choices about the craft elements available to you. Your writing skills expand outward gently, not because of the explosion of criticism, but because of the gentle nurturing.
What I love about AWA
I love that by embracing the affirmations and the practices, it grounds a writing group, and allows us to more fully embrace our own writing and the writings of others. I love that they are essential and not loosely held suggestions. I love that they are upheld with the utmost kindness. I love how it transforms a group and an hour into something of beauty. I love the enthusiasm of the people and facilitators I’ve written with!
Writing is an art form that belongs to all people…
What came to mind is the resistance I hear so often to this idea. In my write, this idea emerged…
And today, I’ll hear people tell me that they are not writers, they have nothing to say, and they. for all intents and purposes, disappear themselves, as if they are trying to beat to the chase someone else who is ready to erase them.
as if they are trying to beat to the chase someone else who is ready to erase them.
Oh, Diane, I love that!!
I am so moved by the last paragraph. The silence and invisibility that comes with denying our writerly self. “… as if they are trying to beat to the chase some else who is ready to erase them” will stay with me. Thank you, Diane.
What I love about AWA and what stays with me is the newest addition to the AWA principles, “how we listen.” What resonates with me is “Deep Listening” … To go deep into another’s writing, leaving our bias and preconceived notions and our own stories behind, and entering into the universe of the narrator … to let the speaker’s voice touch us — to listen with more than our ears … to go deeper than mere hearing … perhaps in a world than needs to strive to listen to understand this is an essential practice … to listen …to be moved/to have a new perspective dawn on us or a new universe open to us/to boldly go where we have never gone before/or to enter into familiar territory but in another’s voice/ to practice listening with an open heart, an open mind/ to listen for craft elements/to listen for what resonates and stays with us/ we can immerse in words/writing/what a speaker is telling us and in what ways … We learn by listening …
What I love about AWA is the guideline that we treat all writing as story and art and we respond to the writing, never assuming that the writing comes from the life of the writer. This creates a kind of psychological cushion that allows brave writing, tender topics, risk taking and vulnerability, especially for memoir and other personal writing.
In school, we are taught to debate, to calculate. We are told to listen for facts, not for beauty. In a circle of writers held by the AWA Method, we are asked to do something radical. We are asked to write the truth, and truth has nothing to do with facts. Truth is what trees feel like when we breathe them into our lungs. Truth is tiny heartbreak after tiny heartbreak. And big joy. Truth is a poem. In an AWA workshop, we are asked to listen with our whole body. Can you taste the words the other writer is reading? In an AWA workshop, we are asked – finally – to set our stories free.
Truth is a tree! I love the many ways truth shows up in our writing. And I love the idea that the workshop sets the stories free.
What do I love about AWA? We tell stories that we don’t know before we tell them. we play. We laugh. We cry. We do this year after year. We do it in all weather. We Zoom when the roads are too bad, when we are sick, when our mothers are dying and we can’t leave her apartment but we need to express ourselves in community. A writer is one who writes. I love to see people delighted in their own work. I love to demystify craft, to watch people write incredible poetry to their great surprise. The vulnerability present in a group who has been writing together a long time is like no other vulnerability I know. We witness each other standing tall, owning ourselves, speaking what we know. And we do not rush in to comfort or affirm in ways that typically occur when vulnerability is exposed. We behold each other and mirror back what is strong.
I love to watch small children create. They are, for that tiny window of time, engrossed. Often all you see is the top of their head bobbing as they bend over the page, or a tongue being thrust out the side of their mouth as inspiration takes over. Then you see the pride: “Look what I made!” They won’t let you give half glances or weak drabbles of “That’s nice.” You must stand as though before a starry night, a pond of water lilies, or a lady with a mysterious smile. The work must be admired. They don’t ask, “Is this any good?” They know it’s good because it’s their creation.
And then something happens. A classmate makes fun of it, a teacher gives a poor grade, a parent points out the weaknesses before the strengths. And they start putting creativity in the corner where judgement, embarrassment, and shame lurk. They receive the message, a worldwide echo, that this essential work of being human and carrying this life, is frivolous.
Some seal it off behind a brick wall with only a small gap where an innovative solution, a bold fashion choice, or the recognition of animals in clouds can seep out.
But then a friend or a colleague or a mandatory “wellness” day puts them in a particular kind of workshop with a particular kind of method. A few strokes on the page, the courage to read aloud, words of affirmation and encouragement and the deepest kind of noticing convince them. Their writing is stunning, vivid, powerful, moving, hilarious, musical, imaginative, relatable … and they are, and have always been, a writer.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT AWA
When you adhere to the method, it works. It often creates magic.
This has been my consistent experience while leading workshops at a public library for 20 years, usually
with people who have never heard of AWA. The leader starts the
process, puts the practices into place. Then people write — and
surprise themselves. Once they get comfortable and familiar,
they take their writing to places they never expected.
Another aspect that drew me to AWA and matters deeply to me–
it doesn’t require certain degrees. I love to learn but have no master’s degree in anything
much less any higher degree.
What I love about AWA!
I have always been struck by the clear link between creativity and safety that is a cornerstone for AWA. It is hard to find your voice and share it if you don’t feel safe. I facilitate groups in person, on line, and in prison and seeing the arc of growth as people are impacted by both the permission to be creative and the feeling of safety inherent in the environment, gifts us all with a sense of freedom in our work. That is powerful. Every Time!
A little bit from my “why I love AWA”:
I love to be surrounded by writers who write, as we alchemically make ourselves writers, as we take part in this ancient practice of setting down words.
The retreat this past weekend was amazing. Looking forward to next year already! What I love about AWA is it is setting me free.