Stretch. Breathe. Write:
Opening the Writer's Heart
with Michele Berger
and Marjorie Hudson
Every writer needs to find a pathway to the heart's best work, and every writer needs a strategy for relieving the physical and psychic stresses of the writing life. Yoga, focused breath work, and meditation can connect us to the source of deeper creativity and relieve those stresses. These practices can increase our attention and amplify our intention as writers. In this workshop, gentle stretching and breathing exercises prepare the body to work, while heart-focused meditations help open the mind to the resonant depths of our heart's wisdom.
Award-winning writer Marjorie Hudson and writer/certified yoga instructor Michele Tracy Berger will take the group through a series of meditations and stretches followed by writing exercises that seek the depths of memory, imagination, and feeling. You'll go home with some useful “yoga for writers” practices that can help reduce stress in your spine, arms, and hands. You'll also go home with a refreshed spirit, sparks for new projects, fresh eyes for old projects, and an awareness of the deep supports available for your work.
No prior knowledge of yoga or meditation required. Open to all levels of writers.
Marjorie Hudson, MFA, is an award-winning educator and author of Accidental Birds of the Carolinas (stories) and Searching for Virginia Dare (creative nonfiction), both from Press 53.
Five anthologies have featured her work, including the essays “Dear Miss Joni Mitchell” in Idol Talk: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuations that Changed their Lives, “Darlin Corey,” in Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas, Ed. Ann Wicker, and “Sufi Dancing with Dad,” in Birthed from Scorched Hearts: Women Respond to War, Ed. MariJo Moore.
Her Kitchen Table Writing Workshops feature creative writing and craft classes for beginners and post-MFA writers alike. With 12 years of small group workshop experience, she has been leading workshops with Michele Tracy Berger since 2012.
Michele Tracy Berger, Ph.D, is an award-winning professor, a certified yoga teacher, a writer and a creativity coach. She is associate professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and former Director of the Faculty Fellows Program at UNC-Chapel Hill's Institute for the Arts and Humanities. She teaches and conducts research in a wide variety of areas, including racial and gender health disparities.
Her main love is writing speculative fiction, though she also is known to write poetry and creative nonfiction, too. Her sci-fi novella, about a virus transmitted through a “natural” hair product,
Reenu-You was recently published by Book Smugglers Publishing.
Her practice and teaching of yoga and meditation, over the past two decades, has been influenced and inspired by outstanding teachers in the Iyengar, Kundalini and Body Mind Centering (BMC) traditions.
