Writing Workshop - a letter from Susan

Dear all,

For those attending the workshop, please find below a letter from Susan with a few words on the contents and what to expect.

For those who haven't yet registered, you can still send us an email confirming until Friday 22nd Oct. The workshop will be held at ESOC (room K112, above the canteen) on Saturday the 30th Oct., from 10:00 to 17:00, with lunch break from 12:30 to 14:00 in a nearby restaurant. The club will take care of coffee, tea and cookies during the workshop, but feel free to bring any other nice things to share. Please make sure you bring an ID with photo to enter ESOC. Bring a laptop if you have otherwise pen and paper will also do fine.

Participation fee is 25€.

THE PERSONAL STORY: A WRITING WORKSHOP

“I am trying to tell you a story and to reveal the nature of story at the same time.

A story isn’t a linear event. It weaves and hums. It goes out and circles back.

A story is…it is organic. It develops. It lives and it dies.

Perhaps it is a living thing. A divine gift. The map for the soul.

Let’s not approach it in the old ways.

Let’s not presume to capture it or control it.

Let’s try to understand it on its own terms.

Each story is particular, composed of many particularities. It never happened before. It will never happen again. A story is created from the events of our lives but it is choreographed elsewhere. An invisible hand reaches toward us from “over there” arranging and ordering. Our task is to meet it. Sometimes the hand offers elements we could not gather ourselves—a dream, a sign—that becomes part of the story, than can even be the heart of the story.

You—yes, you, the one who is reading this—you will bring something to this story. Or this story may enter your story and you may become part of it and it part of you. What will come of all of this? Who will we become through this meeting? We can’t know. We will see.

-Deena Metzger, ENTERING THE GHOST RIVER

Hello Everyone:

I so look forward to our work together.

I just wanted to touch base and let you know some of what I have planned in our time together.

A few basics:

Please bring a laptop or paper and pen. We will be writing and sharing our work together. Hopefully our work spaces will allow for wi fi and we can email work to each other but we can figure this aspect out.

Breaks are important and we will take a couple. Bring something to refresh yourself- a drink of something good, some nuts, whatever will give you a little lift.

Our work:

We will be writing to prompts exploring our personal stories. The first three hours we will focus on this basic aspect and allow the work to grow and evolve.

The second session—for those of you part of the day long session—will take the exercises and move them into monologue and perhaps dialogue.

Simple really. A day of digging around, listening, offering and seeing what happens.

I tend to use the work of Deena Metzger , a terrific teacher, writer, healer as my jumping off point in most situations.

Please feel free to be in touch with me before I come at susan@susanmerson.com with any questions, requests or concerns. I leave the States October 25 for my trip to Germany.

See you soon and am so looking forward to it.

Best

Susan

More from Deena Metzger, ENTERING THE GHOST RIVER

Story is an essential structure of mind and an active principle, a living narrative structure, coherent and beautiful. Sometimes we tell the story, that is “what happened”, but that is the least of its functions. Story gathers and integrates the elements of event and imagination, reflection and image into a point, the bindu or the infinitesimally dense particle that birthed the entire universe in the Big Bang. When it opens, meaning emerges in a flow or explosion of light and understanding. We don’t know the entire story until the moment when all the parts are gathered, resonant, coexistent and then revealed. Only then and in that moment. Every story is like this. And we live countless stories simultaneously and sequentially. Perhaps, ultimately, we are each a story, a dynamic relationship of elements, its own unique shape resonant with larger stories that form the universal grid from which we emerge. These larger stories continue to shape our story as we mature and remain the focal point toward which we are ultimately drawn. The bindu at the beginning and the omega point at the end. And between them all—possibilities, but within our own shape.

Story is given and made. It is offered to us and we are constantly creating it. The essential tension is part of the paradox or several paradoxes which each of us, knowingly or unknowingly, has been given to hold, to dance with, to explore for her or his entire life.