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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.

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What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.
~ from AN IMAGINARY LIFE by David Malouf
 
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