WRITING THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL
COURSE DETAILS
COURSE OVERVIEW
Are you writing the story only you can write? Are you telling it in the way that only you can tell? Do you have the courage to keep going?
Led by one of our favorite teachers, Impracticum's newest workshop intensive helps students bring their full human attention to the practices of composition and editing while also surfacing deeper layers of creative consciousness through yoga and meditation. Raffel's immersive and physical approach to craft not only encourages writers to discover more radically subjective ways of expressing themselves on the page, but also to remain more lucidly and feelingly present in their everyday lives. During the course, students will devote one part of their time to in-class exercises—writing, movement, and meditative practices—and part to workshopping one another’s pieces. Students will be invited to submit one piece of no more than 4,000 words for critique. Fiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir, and hybrid-genre work are all welcome. No prior yoga experience is necessary. I have often said that for me the best books are a ticket to someplace new. That doesn’t necessarily mean someplace new geographically, historically, or culturally. It could just as well be a ticket to look at the most mundane corner of daily life in a new way, to decontextualize the familiar in a way that makes it numinous. Yoga offers us a way of making space for the unknown, a means of investigating unexamined beliefs and assumptions in a way that affords us that ticket to someplace new. This is not about flowing and then free-writing or journaling; it’s about engaging both deep interiority and analytic skills. Precision of sentence-making and composition put those insights on the page, transferring the feeling to the reader rather than telling the reader what to feel. -Dawn Raffel |
ABOUT DAWN RAFFEL
Dawn Raffel’s most recent book is The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, an NPR great read for 2018 and a Christopher Award winner. Her next book, Boundless as the Sky, is a hybrid collection that will be out in January, 2023. Previous books include a memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, a novel, Carrying the Body, and two story collections, In the Year of Long Division and Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. Her work has appeared in BOMB, NOON, O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, and other publications. In addition, she has worked as an editor for several lifetimes in dog years. Her classes combine an editor's nuts-and-bolts tools with embodied and meditative practices that tap into deeper layers of consciousness. |
Letter from Instructor
This class synthesizes what I’ve learned over several lifetimes in dog years as an editor with what I’ve learned studying and practicing yoga. It combines granular, analytical attention to sentence- making and composition with principles of yoga that address the roots of creativity. It includes meditative practices that expand our capacity for perception and insight.
But first: What is yoga?
Although we often think of yoga as movement, those sun salutations and down-dogs are the tip of a philosophical iceberg. The purpose of yoga, as stated in the Bhagavad Gita, is the practice of overcoming the obstacles of the mind. Most writers devote considerable energy to cultivating a life of the mind. So how do we balance cultivating a life of the mind with overcoming the obstacles of the mind? Why do we need to?
My story:
For a very long time, going back to my undergraduate years in college, I had felt something was missing from the cerebral, from-the-neck-up way that creative writing is taught. Yes, there is value in the traditional workshopped, analytic approach, and I have both participated in and led workshops for decades. My background is as an editor rather than in academia, so when I began teaching, I incorporated an editor’s tools and insights. Yet that “missing piece” continued to nag at me.
Then in 2014, I had a contract to write my fifth book, a work of nonfiction, and as the deadline loomed, I began to panic. I had thousands of pages of information but could not find a way to put them together, and it wasn’t a problem someone else could solve for me. I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, envisioning a catastrophic cascade: I can’t write the book, I have to return the advance (which I had already spent on research), my agent fires me, and I never write again. During the day, I would stare sleep-deprived at my computer, making no headway. Finally, one day I decided to step away and go to a yoga class in town.
I had dabbled in yoga off and on over the years, but I am not graceful or athletic, and I will achieve an Instagram-worthy pose when pigs fly. Still, something drew me to (clumsily) press on, and something kept me coming back day after day. There wasn’t an aha moment, but in time, I began to be able to sleep better and most importantly, I was able to calm the panic enough to actually write the book, and to write it in a way I hadn’t previously considered.
My curiosity was piqued. I wanted to learn more about yoga, its roots, and the way it can help writers. During the period of time between the completion of the manuscript and its publication in 2018, I completed a 200-hour yoga alliance teacher certification, and later added a hundred hours of certifications in meditative practices. I studied yoga philosophy at the Bhakti Center in New York and through Oxford online. I also began teaching yoga & creative writing together and incorporated yoga philosophy into every workshop I teach. I would never call myself an expert in yoga; I am still very much a student. But these are some things I’ve learned—ways I invite writers to use yoga in service of understanding how the mind works as well as how to tap into deeper wells of creativity.
A ticket to someplace new:
I have often said that for me the best books are a ticket to someplace new. That doesn’t necessarily mean someplace new geographically, historically, or culturally. It could just as well be a ticket to look at the most mundane corner of daily life in a new way, to decontextualize the familiar in a way that makes it numinous. Yoga offers us a way of making space for the unknown, a means of investigating unexamined beliefs and assumptions in a way that affords us that ticket to someplace new.
This is not about flowing and then free-writing or journaling; it’s about engaging both deep interiority and analytic skills. Precision of sentence-making and composition put those insights on the page, transferring the feeling to the reader rather than telling the reader what to feel.
Benefits of the workshop:
The traditional workshop offers genuine value. At its best, it provides a sensitive leader and a group of engaged, supportive colleagues who can help the writer see what might be missing, point out opportunities, ask probing questions, and create an environment of accountability. Workshops often address places in the work where logic is missing or unclear, more information is needed (or alternately, the pace is dragging), as well as “mistakes,” such as point-of-view lapses. A workshop leader and participants might also suggest relevant reading material. All of this can be extremely helpful, but it has its limitations.
Limitations of the traditional workshop:
Yoga offers:
Mnemonic postures:
We’ll explore the basic yoga asanas (postures) both in terms of their targeted physical and emotional effect (i.e. heart openers, hip openers) and metaphorically, as they relate to principles of writing. For example, tadasana (mountain pose) embodies the principle of opening from simplicity, from which one finds scope. Tree pose embodies the principle of rooting to rise (building on the foundations you’ve set down) and balancing effort to ease (relying on techniques and ways of being on the page that are familiar and easy for you vs. risking something new).
Yoga philosophy: ahimsa and satya:
Two of the foundations of yoga are ahimsa (nonviolence, including with language) and satya (truth-telling). How do we find the intersection? Memoir writers in particular grapple with this question, but all writers do. How do we tell the truth with compassion as opposed to, say, for revenge, which results in a lesser work? How do we allow our “characters” (real or fictional) their full humanity?
Writerly, analytical tools:
Beginnings: Examples of the principle of beginning with simplicity (which is embodied in tadasana/mountain pose) and opening onto scope. This would include a granular discussion of a wide variety of openers and how the writer quickly establishes voice, stance, presence on the page, and the sense that something is at stake. An unspoken contract is established with the reader in the opening paragraph. I look at both classic openings (Tolstoy, Calvino, Hurston, O’Connor) and living writers.
Sentence-making: Precision, acoustical properties of the sentence (sibilant vs. percussive, etc.), pattern-making and pattern-breaking. Voice and character both issue out of sentence-making and precision of diction, as does authority. Sentence-making is how we transfer feeling to the reader.
Structure: Recursion (building on what you’ve begun with); managing the flow of information (providing enough information to satisfy readers while retaining enough mystery to keep them turning pages); establishing the way time works in the story (linear, circular, backward-arrow, braided, mosaic). Unlike, say, visual art, which is apprehended all at once (and then, upon deeper consideration, one begins to see more detail), written work unspools over time. How does the “clock” work? Where are the lines of tension? With every sentence, you are gaining or losing energy.
Dialogue: Some guidelines for dialogue and the act of deep listening, listening for the spaces between words.
Metaphor: The use of metaphor in the story, avoiding received language, keeping the reader visually in the scene.
Yoga nidra and prana nidra
The care and (emotional) feeding of the writer: Self-care, managing competition, success dysmorphia, etc. Dispelling the myth that depression and anxiety are integral parts of the creative process—i.e. the cult of misery.
Sustainable writing: Holding it together over the long run.
Places where I’ve taught: Columbia University (undergrad and MFA), Summer Literary Seminars (St. Petersburg, Russia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Tblisi, Georgia; Montreal; and internationally on zoom—pandemic era), The Center for Fiction in New York (Fiction, yoga & creative writing, cross-genre), Wildacres (North Carolina), Stanton Street Yoga (NYC), Westport Lighthouse Writers Retreat (Westport, WA). I’ve also served for many years as an editorial consultant for the emerging writer fellows at the Center for Fiction and as a writer-to-writer mentor at AWP. I teach a weekly yoga nidra and prana nidra class privately and currently work full-time as a developmental editor.
But first: What is yoga?
Although we often think of yoga as movement, those sun salutations and down-dogs are the tip of a philosophical iceberg. The purpose of yoga, as stated in the Bhagavad Gita, is the practice of overcoming the obstacles of the mind. Most writers devote considerable energy to cultivating a life of the mind. So how do we balance cultivating a life of the mind with overcoming the obstacles of the mind? Why do we need to?
My story:
For a very long time, going back to my undergraduate years in college, I had felt something was missing from the cerebral, from-the-neck-up way that creative writing is taught. Yes, there is value in the traditional workshopped, analytic approach, and I have both participated in and led workshops for decades. My background is as an editor rather than in academia, so when I began teaching, I incorporated an editor’s tools and insights. Yet that “missing piece” continued to nag at me.
Then in 2014, I had a contract to write my fifth book, a work of nonfiction, and as the deadline loomed, I began to panic. I had thousands of pages of information but could not find a way to put them together, and it wasn’t a problem someone else could solve for me. I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, envisioning a catastrophic cascade: I can’t write the book, I have to return the advance (which I had already spent on research), my agent fires me, and I never write again. During the day, I would stare sleep-deprived at my computer, making no headway. Finally, one day I decided to step away and go to a yoga class in town.
I had dabbled in yoga off and on over the years, but I am not graceful or athletic, and I will achieve an Instagram-worthy pose when pigs fly. Still, something drew me to (clumsily) press on, and something kept me coming back day after day. There wasn’t an aha moment, but in time, I began to be able to sleep better and most importantly, I was able to calm the panic enough to actually write the book, and to write it in a way I hadn’t previously considered.
My curiosity was piqued. I wanted to learn more about yoga, its roots, and the way it can help writers. During the period of time between the completion of the manuscript and its publication in 2018, I completed a 200-hour yoga alliance teacher certification, and later added a hundred hours of certifications in meditative practices. I studied yoga philosophy at the Bhakti Center in New York and through Oxford online. I also began teaching yoga & creative writing together and incorporated yoga philosophy into every workshop I teach. I would never call myself an expert in yoga; I am still very much a student. But these are some things I’ve learned—ways I invite writers to use yoga in service of understanding how the mind works as well as how to tap into deeper wells of creativity.
A ticket to someplace new:
I have often said that for me the best books are a ticket to someplace new. That doesn’t necessarily mean someplace new geographically, historically, or culturally. It could just as well be a ticket to look at the most mundane corner of daily life in a new way, to decontextualize the familiar in a way that makes it numinous. Yoga offers us a way of making space for the unknown, a means of investigating unexamined beliefs and assumptions in a way that affords us that ticket to someplace new.
This is not about flowing and then free-writing or journaling; it’s about engaging both deep interiority and analytic skills. Precision of sentence-making and composition put those insights on the page, transferring the feeling to the reader rather than telling the reader what to feel.
Benefits of the workshop:
The traditional workshop offers genuine value. At its best, it provides a sensitive leader and a group of engaged, supportive colleagues who can help the writer see what might be missing, point out opportunities, ask probing questions, and create an environment of accountability. Workshops often address places in the work where logic is missing or unclear, more information is needed (or alternately, the pace is dragging), as well as “mistakes,” such as point-of-view lapses. A workshop leader and participants might also suggest relevant reading material. All of this can be extremely helpful, but it has its limitations.
Limitations of the traditional workshop:
- The traditional workshop (including analysis of model works) relies heavily on analytic thinking and therefore engages only a fraction of our intelligence.
- By the time the work under consideration is on the page as a draft, its possibilities have become finite; the universe of expression has grown narrower. The workshop doesn’t address the roots of creativity.
- In order to workshop, we develop a shared vocabulary and often a shared set of writing rules, as well as mutual literary references. While these can be very helpful, they can also become limiting and insular, and they encourage participants to do things as they have always been done.
- Some voices tend to drown out others; it is almost always the case that some participants are more assertive and confident than others.
- Workshop participants may be competitive and may come to the table with their own agenda.
Yoga offers:
- A way of calming the overanxious mind, which is beneficial in assuaging writer’s block (fear) and in breaking negative, constraining thought patterns.
- An embodied practice that helps draw on “body memory” and emotions stored in the body, insights and awareness that repose in the spaces between language and labels, deep intuition.
- Yoga allows us to balance outside opinions with a deeply interior “inside opinion.”
- Yoga includes not only movement but also deep meditative practices that induce drug-free “altered states.” Yoga nidra relaxes the body and puts the mind into the highly creative space between waking and dreaming, while prana nidra begins to expand the consciousness outside of the body. Both practices allow us to loosen our tight grip on the stories we’ve told ourselves again and again and to make space for the unknown.
- Yoga is not a replacement; it’s an addition. All art is problem-solving; yoga gives us another set of tools to help solve problems and respond to challenges.
Mnemonic postures:
We’ll explore the basic yoga asanas (postures) both in terms of their targeted physical and emotional effect (i.e. heart openers, hip openers) and metaphorically, as they relate to principles of writing. For example, tadasana (mountain pose) embodies the principle of opening from simplicity, from which one finds scope. Tree pose embodies the principle of rooting to rise (building on the foundations you’ve set down) and balancing effort to ease (relying on techniques and ways of being on the page that are familiar and easy for you vs. risking something new).
Yoga philosophy: ahimsa and satya:
Two of the foundations of yoga are ahimsa (nonviolence, including with language) and satya (truth-telling). How do we find the intersection? Memoir writers in particular grapple with this question, but all writers do. How do we tell the truth with compassion as opposed to, say, for revenge, which results in a lesser work? How do we allow our “characters” (real or fictional) their full humanity?
Writerly, analytical tools:
Beginnings: Examples of the principle of beginning with simplicity (which is embodied in tadasana/mountain pose) and opening onto scope. This would include a granular discussion of a wide variety of openers and how the writer quickly establishes voice, stance, presence on the page, and the sense that something is at stake. An unspoken contract is established with the reader in the opening paragraph. I look at both classic openings (Tolstoy, Calvino, Hurston, O’Connor) and living writers.
Sentence-making: Precision, acoustical properties of the sentence (sibilant vs. percussive, etc.), pattern-making and pattern-breaking. Voice and character both issue out of sentence-making and precision of diction, as does authority. Sentence-making is how we transfer feeling to the reader.
Structure: Recursion (building on what you’ve begun with); managing the flow of information (providing enough information to satisfy readers while retaining enough mystery to keep them turning pages); establishing the way time works in the story (linear, circular, backward-arrow, braided, mosaic). Unlike, say, visual art, which is apprehended all at once (and then, upon deeper consideration, one begins to see more detail), written work unspools over time. How does the “clock” work? Where are the lines of tension? With every sentence, you are gaining or losing energy.
Dialogue: Some guidelines for dialogue and the act of deep listening, listening for the spaces between words.
Metaphor: The use of metaphor in the story, avoiding received language, keeping the reader visually in the scene.
Yoga nidra and prana nidra
The care and (emotional) feeding of the writer: Self-care, managing competition, success dysmorphia, etc. Dispelling the myth that depression and anxiety are integral parts of the creative process—i.e. the cult of misery.
Sustainable writing: Holding it together over the long run.
Places where I’ve taught: Columbia University (undergrad and MFA), Summer Literary Seminars (St. Petersburg, Russia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Tblisi, Georgia; Montreal; and internationally on zoom—pandemic era), The Center for Fiction in New York (Fiction, yoga & creative writing, cross-genre), Wildacres (North Carolina), Stanton Street Yoga (NYC), Westport Lighthouse Writers Retreat (Westport, WA). I’ve also served for many years as an editorial consultant for the emerging writer fellows at the Center for Fiction and as a writer-to-writer mentor at AWP. I teach a weekly yoga nidra and prana nidra class privately and currently work full-time as a developmental editor.
