Open Writing Studio
In July 2023, I welcomed a group of enthusiastic writers to my free Open Writing Studio.
This WriteSPACE Special Event offered a wonderful opportunity for me to show them around my new WriteSPACE membership area, where members of my premium WriteSPACE Studio membership tier can access a variety of resources to support them in their writing practice.
From there, we dove straight into a 90-minute Live Writing Studio session so that participants could experience this core feature of the WriteSPACE Studio.
Here is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:
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Not only was this special event an in-depth tour of the new website and member’s Studio pages (Hurray! I love the new layout), it was also a generative, interactive Live Writing Studio (LWS) session.
I come to the LWS to find a sense of community with other writers, to be challenged by Helen in some creative wordplay experiments, and to gain perceptive feedback from others on my writing. In fact, even if it’s not about my own writing, I still learn from the feedback of others. I’m always coming away from these events with a new vision for my work or myself as a writer. Being part of a writing community motivates me and keeps me accountable to my writing.
For other WriteSPACE Studio members, these sessions are about:
Connecting with others across different countries and disciplines — From Spain to Australia! From education to engineering!
Sharing in a “spiritual, uplifting group that keeps you going … and keeps you responsible.”
Making yourself a bit vulnerable by showing your writing in a constructive, encouraging space.
Putting fingers-to-keyboard to finally write that book proposal you have been mulling over.
Seeing yourself as “a writer practising a craft rather than just a PhD student pushing out a thesis!”
We began the writing studio with some quick introductions before diving into a creative warm-up together (inspired by NZ poet Glenn Colquhoun’s An Explanation of Poetry for my Father). Why not try it yourself?
Choose a word (for example, STUDIO)
Write each letter on a different line in your notebook.
For each letter, write one line of poetry that describes what that letter looks like.
Here’s a compilation of some of the beautiful lines produced by our LWS writers:
S is the shape of a swirl when it’s not done…yet
T is a power pose beforehand, and maybe after!
U is a canopy shielding from the rain or an unprompted grin
D is a bridge of words and connections
I is that very first mark on the page
O is for open mouths and minds
After our warm-up, we were ready for a timed writing sprint, with each one of us working independently in a shared digital workspace.
Then, in the second half of the studio session, Helen guided the WINDOWS session (Writers IN Discussion with Other WriterS). The WINDOWS sessions are usually 2-3 people in breakout rooms, sharing ideas and editing each other’s work sentence by sentence. (If this sounds like a bit of you, I hope to see you there at the next session!) This time, we all stayed together in the main room, where a few brave writers shared a drafted paragraph and received Helen’s expert coaching feedback, as well as insights and advice from other participants.
We ended this wonderful event with a collaborative poem, with each participant choosing one word to sum up something we had discussed or thought about during the session.
Here are our two rather enigmatic poems:
Miss Rizos: spine diving, light spark, normalize, beggars, closed pictures, celebrating curls
Crossroads: springboard courage, accordion trampoline, lurking, exhale, champagne heat, soulful barking
A big thank you to Helen for this informative and inspiring special event and a warm welcome to all the new writers who joined us. I hope to see you all again in the 6-week Live Writing Studio “Creativity Sequence” starting in early September. Until soon!
If you would like to know more about the WriteSPACE or WS Studio, we would love to hear from you!
A recording of this two-part WriteSPACE Special Event is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.
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