Skip to main content
Home
  • About
  • Quotations
  • Newsletters
  • Events
  • Blogs
  • Donate
  • Subscribe
  • Search

Discovering and Writing Our Stories

With Dr. Lana Portolano
July 6-7, 2007
Friday evening - Saturday evening
Retreat House

This retreat continues a tradition of story retreats and lectures at Rolling Ridge by experienced practitioners who have shaped our understanding of story and human consciousness, including:

  • Biblical story telling
  • How the mind discovers meanings in dailing experiences by constructing stories
  • Therapeutic uses of story
  • How the coherence of our lives depends on stories which lace our thoughts and conversations every day

Lana is a writer of autobiographical stories and teacher in the master's in professional writing program at Towson University in Baltimore. Through several brief lectures and workshops she will help retreatants to recognize elements of story in our lived experiences and to construct a narrative that unlocks their meanings.

Lana has been on personal writing retreats at Rolling Ridge in order to write a memoir organized around her experience of adopting and parenting several Ukrainian daughters.

Join us for lively conversation around shared home-cooked meals, enlivening lectures and discussion, writing workshops, solitude and time for walking and doing your own creative writing. Lectures include Narrative Structure: How the Way We Talk Shapes the Way We Think, Story in Sacred Texts and Traditions, and Stories of Our Lives: Giving Body to Ideals.

Retreatants are welcome to arrive at the Retreat House any time after 4:00 pm in order to settle in or hike on the forest trails before dinner. Each retreatant should bring sheets or sleeping bag, pillows, towels and toiletries.

Registration fee for this retreat is $50. We want this retreat to be available for anyone with interest in creative writing, regardless of ability to pay. Scholarships are available for those who request it.

Newsletter Subscription

There is no cost to have the Friends of Silence monthly letter sent to you each month.

Yes, I want to subscribe!

Free Daily Quote

Enjoying the Friends of Silence monthly newsletter? Now you can sign up to receive a free daily quote in your inbox each morning taken from more than 37 years of 410 newsletters and 5,450 quotes on silence and the contemplative path.

Sign Me Up!

Donate Now

For the past 35 years, a small band of dedicated friends have poured their hearts and love into Friends of Silence.

Each month we send out the newsletter in print and email to a growing community of over 10,000 people.

The monthly newsletter of contemplative quotes remains free and is made possible by your generosity and support.

If our work brings you any hope and a sense of belonging, then please consider supporting our labor of love with a donation.

And if you’ve already given, from the bottom of our hearts: THANK YOU.

Donate Now

Search Quotes

Quotations by Author
Quotations by Source
Quotations by Topic
Daily Quotes
Get iPhone App

Quote of the Day

The essential self is fundamentally invulnerable and at ease, because it is anchored in Being. This anchoring at the core of oneself allows the personality to be much more vulnerable, open, honest. If the essential self adopts a provisional or social identity — which may be necessary for certain reasons—it does not take it too seriously, does not become completely identified with it. The essential self does not become inflated with its identity, it lives in the humility of presence and can keep a sense of humor about itself.

~ from THE KNOWING HEART by Kabir Helminski
 
Purchase from Amazon

Home | About | Quotations | Newsletters | Events | Blogs | Donate | Subscribe | Search

Friends of Silence Friends of Silence | 1681 Patriots Way | Harpers Ferry WV 25425 | Phone: 304-870-4574
Unless otherwise noted, all material © Friends of Silence 2025