Saturday, September 27, 1:30 – 4:30 p.m.
St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Durango
Instructor: Beth Paulson
Fee: $40, preregistration requested. Register online here, or download a registration form here to pay by check.
"Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the human soul," wrote Paul Celan. Mary Oliver asks, "what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?"
Reading and writing poetry can be a way to experience spiritual awareness in our lives. As we allow ourselves to encounter and apprehend poetic language deeply, we tune our minds to a deeper awareness of our selves, the world, and our place in it.
In this workshop we will look at selected writings by a few contemporary poets whose work exemplifies poetry as prayer and meditation, including Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, and Jane Hirshfield. Additionally, we will discuss reading, writing and using poetry in our daily reflections, and we will practice together some approaches to both widen our understanding and further our practice of spiritual writing.
Participants will receive packets of poems and lists of suggested meditative writing prompts, activities, and names of journals that publish spiritual writing.
Beth Paulson writes and leads poetry and creativity workshops in Colorado where she has lived since 1999. Before that she taught English at California State University for over 20 years. She has also been a columnist for the Ouray County Plaindealer. Beth currently leads Poetica, a bimonthly poetry workshop for Ridgway-Ouray area writers and co-directs the monthly Open Bard Poetry Series in Ridgway.
Beth's poems have appeared widely in over a hundred literary magazines, including most recently Red Rock Review, Pinyon Rview, The Kerf, The Lyric, and Passager. She has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes for poetry in 2007, 2009 and 2011, and was a Best of the Net nominee in 2011. Her poems are also included in several national anthologies, including Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest (University of Texas Press, 2007), and What's Nature Got to Do With Me? (Native West Press, 2011).
Beth is the author of four poetry collections: Canyon Notes (Mt. Sneffels Press 2012), Wild Raspberries (Plain View Press, 2009), The Company of Trees (2004) and The Truth About Thunder (2001), both by Ponderosa Press. You can read more poems on her website, www.wordcatcher.org.
An avid hiker and nordic skier, Beth lives with her husband Don in Ouray County in the shadow of Whitehouse Mountain.
