Writing with your world
Slowing down, listening deeply, Telling the truth
An Autumn - Spring slow-flowing exploration of ensouled bioregional writing
September 24th - March 17th
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
—Mary Oliver
A 6 Month Online Writing Class
Potent writing emanates from paying attention; from listening to the “words beneath the words;” from following a breeze like it’s leading to a great secret. Potent writing is a trail map to moments of true presence and the courage to speak the truth hidden in plain sight. Potent writing is not neutral.
In these days of flatlined apocalypse, of unfeeling consumption, of enforced complicity with an unchosen culture, what words want to rise? What truths have you waited too long already to voice? What outrages, passions, and loves for this tender wild planet and your own heart are waiting for your attention?
Writing With Your World is a container for leaning into the essential questions and considerations of your life. What do you really want, and who are you, really? How deep are you willing to dig to find the wellspring that is your particular way of seeing and saying at this moment in earth’s story? There are things only you can speak with, for, and to the particular place you live. Will you?
Merging lessons on the craft of writing with practices for accessing deep imagination and transpersonal awareness, Writing With Your World is a group journey into discovering and speaking the meanings of your entangled relationship with the creatures, watersheds, activisms, people, and possibilities of your own home ground.
what will we do in this writing course?
Readings, practices, and “assignments” for growing in the technical craft of creative nonfiction and poetic writing
A group container with an emphasis on gently building discipline/accountability into your writing practice
Practices focused on interacting with the beings, dynamics, and activisms native to your particular bioregion
An exploration of deep imagination utilizing the practices of dreamwork, active imagination, journal practices, counsel, and conversing with the wild world
Ongoing peer workshops and instructor feedback
An invitation into visibility and a mutual support network for learning to speak and write deeper levels of your embodied truth
A cultivation of ecological awareness and increased sensitivity to your place in what Mary Oliver calls “the family of things.”
Register for Writing with your World
To register, please fill out the application below. If you’d like more information, I would be glad to connect with you - please email me.
Writing workshop details
Dates and Times:
Two formal meetings, with an optional community session and a week off each month, (2-3 meetings per month) with two weeks off for the holidays.
Sundays @ 12:00 - 2:00 pm EST on Zoom. September 24th 2023 - March 16th, 2024
Course Overview:
WWYW will be spacious, moving between formal lessons, writing exercises, and other teachings and community spaces for connecting, heart sharing, and things like dreamwork, deep listening, peer writing workshops, and embodiment explorations.
In addition to the slow pace, WWYW will feature an organized and structured exploration of personal narrative. Using focused journal prompts, dreamwork, guided imagery, talking council and other practices, we will uncover personal myths that are ripe for the telling. Together, we will uncover the stories that must be told, that in the telling will initiate us into what David Whyte calls “the real conversation” of that very step we know we need to take.
The third and final section of the course will bring these two lines of inquiry together while honing the technical craft of writing. Drawing upon Ensouling Language by Stephen Harrod Buhner, On Writing Well by William Zinnser, Writing For Your Life by Deena Metzger, Writing Into the Wound by Roxanne Gay, and others, we’ll work with the story of place and the story of self and the way they intersect. In what ways are our own personal myths implicated in the myth, indeed the way we belong to the place we live? When we expand our sense of self to include the land, what are the unique loves and outrages we are called to voice?
This cohort is designed with the muse in mind; as a courtship to the forces beyond self who seem to respond to sincerity, slowness, and intention. For that reason, we will cultivate a community of practice, a field of accountability and momentum to lean on in the sometimes lonely work of writing. Utilizing technology, we’ll have an online sharing community (Mighty Networks) and a collective WhatsApp/Telegram group to go along with the weekly calls and practices. We’ll also have an optional online Writing Retreat - an invitational 2.5 days where we dedicate ourselves to the work and the words we are deeply called to.
Pricing:
Early Bird: (Before August 25th) $900 one-time fee or $170/month for 6 months
Regular: (After August 25th) $1000 one-time fee or $180/month for 6 months
Accessibility
Limited BIPOC/Need-Based Scholarship spots are available - If you want to join this course but finances are a barrier, email kristopher@remembering-earth.com and we can be in conversation and work to find a solution.
“You must follow the path that opens to you and you must never stop. And it will demand that you shed your skin, over and over and over again. Your skin must be shed for that skin is not the skin of a writer; it is the skin of whatever you were before.”
Stephen Harrod Buhner
Who is this course for?
This third cohort of Writing With Your World is specifically designed for people who are deeply called to cultivate a habitual earth-based writing practice in their lives beyond the scope of the course and who have the time and capacity to dedicate themselves to the container for the entire six-month duration of the course. There’s no specific level of writer that we’re looking for (new writers are welcome!) Rather, the primary ingredients required for success in this course are sincerity, showing up, accountability, and an authentic longing for deep connection to self and earth through the medium of embodied language.
Steps to ensouled Writing
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During Module One, we will focus, multidimensionally, on what it means to exist in a place. While this might seem self-explanatory, it is actually an immensely complex thing. We live in and among countless relationships with humans and other-than-humans, ancestors and inherited traits, wounds, and gifts. We live in places and on top of stories desecrated by the movements of conquest, colonialism, and war. We inhabit lands that have been and still are sacred to specific people, people who are still here despite what dominator culture might say. We live in a specific moment in these places, where the tides of history will be determined by our capacity to listen to something beyond our own conditioned minds.
Weaving between at-home/outdoor practices, research, journaling, and writing explorations, and group council and witnessing, we will take a spacious two months simply to attune and wholeheartedly attend to what’s right here. -
In this module, we will use journaling, council, dreamwork, deep imagination, explorations on the land and at our sit spot, poetry, readings and writing assignments to step back into the river of life, giving ourselves to the mirrors that are always available.
By turning toward narrative in a focused way, we can explore the blended layers of self and get clear about what we’re longing to release and what we’re ready to step into. We’ll also begin to explore the process and practice of formal writing through the work of Stephen Harrod Buhner in his book Ensouling Language. Engaging writing practices and the “felt sense” of “soul” in language, we will look at how to translate the depth of meaning we feel into language that conveys that feeling and meaning to others.
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Module three will be a synthesis of the first two modules. Continuing the practices of slowness, deep listening, self-awareness and embodied feeling, we will open to the intersection of Place and Self in this very moment. We will listen for the deep loves and outrages that bubble to the surface when we really listen, encountering the stories that must be told and that can only be told by us.
This will be the most creative, flexible module of the course - a rich two months with abundant lessons on the craft of writing. In class, we’ll explore and discuss what makes good writing, what draws us in, what wakes us up. Additionally, we’ll have writing workshops where our work will be critiqued (gently) and we’ll begin the editing process.
During this third module, we will share abundant writing time together in Zoom rooms and towards the end of the course you will be given the opportunity to participate in an optional 2.5 day writing retreat where we will slow down to listen, write, workshop, and share.
To register, please fill out the application below. If you’d like more information, I would be glad to connect with you - please email me.
What will I get out of this course?
Writing With Your World will, if you commit to the course, give you a whole lot.
You’ll leave the class feeling significantly more at home where you live in an embodied way. You’ll have tools for opening to animistic ways of knowing and forming deep relationships with other-than-humans. You’ll leave the course with a deeper sense of who you have been, who you are now, and be witnessed in your ripened readiness for the next chapter of your life.
You’ll know what deeply matters to you, what you’re willing to fight for, to grow for, perhaps even to die for. And you’ll gain the nuts-n’-bolts know-how of the creative writing process. Momentum, discipline, where to source meaning and voice, what makes good writing, the process of workshopping and being seen in the vulnerability of writing, the process of publishing, and how to carry writing forward into your life for the long haul.
your guide.
Kristopher Drummond
Having found my way back to life through the words of many potent writers, and through discovering my own healing, meaning, and contribution through sharing my own words, I believe in language as an utterly necessary element of ecological, social, and spiritual regeneration. By that I mean passionate language carries an awakening potential like few other communication mediums and right now, as our inherited cultural myths decompose, we need soulful language and ecological storytelling like no other time in history.
To learn more about me and my work, you can visit my mentor profile or explore my published work or poetry. You can also find my on Instagram @permissionbringer