About Marlee Ledai
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Classes
Women's Spiritual Writing through the Ages (10 weeks)
Tracing the legacy of spiritual writing from a feminine perspective,
this class will facilitate group interaction around a variety of
religious and spiritual traditions. Showcasing history, culture, and
devotional style, we'll explore how faith is expressed powerfully by
women kneading their stories into bread to heal the world. We'll survey
spiritual disciplines and the sacred questions that are at the center of
a spirit-led life.
Weekly writing assignments will involve exploring your own spiritual
terrain. Learn to tap your own wisdom and express it by studying the way
women have always articulated their pain, hope and personal truth. Write
your way into epiphanies from your own experience of the invisible.
Connect with the marketplace for publishers of spiritual writing by
learning to create marketable pieces that do not sacrifice Soul.
Not a class to debate religion or discuss beliefs, this workshop is
offered as an avenue of connection between women who are seeking
understanding of God as called by many names. We will uncover the
influence of female writers, historic and contemporary, who have left a
distinctive spiritual legacy. These include ancients such as the Greek
poet Sappho, Sufi mystic Rabi'a, Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, and
Hindi songwriter, Mirabai. We'll hear from other voices all the way up
to modern social pioneers like Sojourner Truth, philosophical/political
writer Simone Weil, Buddist wisdom writer, Pema Chodron and spiritual
writers with contemporary flair such as Anne Lamott.
Class Outline
Week One
Introduction of class content and format is offered with definitions of
"spiritual" for the purposes of the workshop. Offers discussion of the
importance of the writer as one who "sees," and the process of spiritual
journaling as a way to tap into our own wisdom. Understand the pivotal
experience of pain in seeking the transcendent and a sacred relationship
with Grace. A reading list with internet links is provided for
assignments. Sources for optional reading are suggested.
Week Two
What, and how, we can learn from these writers' gifts and devotion?
Where does one search for wisdom? How does one tap into the intuitive
well of spiritual knowing. What kind of devotional disciplines lead to
illumination? We will ask these questions as we explore our own
imagination and insight.
Week Three
We'll talk about the necessity to take a risk in order to experience,
not just read -- or write -- spiritual truths. We study other women's
experience as we wrestle with words on paper for personal challenge and
profound change. What kinds of questions will you ask yourself? What
kinds of questions will you ask of others?
Week Four
We explore our own spirituality in relation to the historic female
writing we have been reading. We practice, through writing, discovering
the flow of inspiration from an interior source. We'll begin to document
the journey. As we go for raw, original writing, we learn what makes it
authentic and how to capture truth in words without clichés.
Week Five
Think and write naked. Avoid worn prejudices from the past. Openness to
changing and growing is key in our readings and our own writing. We
learn why it is more profound to offer the world our questions than our
answers in spiritual writing. Assignments highlight your spiritual
gifts, how to identify them, and moving into using them in your writing.
Week Six
Threading the needle of story, we learn to pull in all the threads of
our lives: vision, dreams, and pathos/suffering in a way that makes
sense to listeners. We look for greatness in the least-likely of human
experience in and around us. We learn to transform ideals and trauma
into a spiritual take-away.
Week Seven
Create content organization and clarity of message for inspirational
pieces. Avoiding the teachy/preachy, we prepare pieces for the
marketplace without compromising our soul or sacrificing our integrity.
Learn about effective titles and concluding paragraphs for spiritual
writing.
Week Eight
Seek out metaphor and God-consciousness in media and human interaction
all around you. Learn to observe, then weave these into your pieces as
value-added illustrations to round-out the narrative. Listen to what
people don't say. Incorporate the mundane and ordinary into your
spiritual writing.
Week Nine
Survey the broad market that is hungry for spiritual writing -- both
books and articles. Create intriguing queries/proposals for individual
publishers. Glean additional pearls from your own wisdom-writing and
learn to recognize potential spin-off product. Identify where you want
to go from here and to what levels you wish to take your writing.
Week Ten
Conclusion and summary of the course. We'll review how raw experience
looks as conviction and devotion. Learn techniques to look deeper and
think in new ways about future experience and spiritual growth.
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Write From Your Spirit: The Writing of Women (10 weeks)
This class emphasizes priming your creative pump. Let go of contrived feelings about writing along with rigid rules. Write juicy and write real to explore interior terrain and discover what you really have to say. No reading syllabus or one-size-fits-all assignments; our purpose is to initiate personal writing goals that advance connection with your intuition and spiritual sensitivities.
This class is an intimate journey that will prepare you to initiate a consistent writing life. Use it to further your dream to publish or to journal your heart out, create legacies of memoir, or simply to discover what you have to say to yourself. We will accelerate momentum toward a defined personal goal or project identified through clarifying and compelling questions formulated together through class discussion.
Think about it:
Do you want to document a piece of your life experience?
Do you want to explore a specific writing goal through interaction that compels you forward?
Do you want tips on creatively expressing your own moxie, soulfulness, or whimsy?
Do you want to get unstuck and jump-start the discipline of writing?
Do you just want to find out what you have to say to yourself?
Most important, do you want to have fun doing it?
If you answer yes to any one of these questions, this writing class is for you!
Class Outline
Week 1: Your Message is Your Mission
Class mission: to motivate and inspire your personal writing mission.
Short reads and discussion on creating your own mission statement.
Explain individual projects that we´ll develop as class progresses.
Grow your mission by fertilizing it with visuals and latent emotions.
Week 2: Identify Your Soulful Longings
Create your own soul profile as your resume for a writing career.
Ask yourself open-ended questions to kick-start the process.
Work smarter, not harder: put personal passion to work for you.
What is your one-hundred percent dream for writing?
Week 3: Clarify Your Values
Look to yourself for leadership; take charge of what you want.
Discover your values through a class exercise.
Orient your writing around your values to empower your writing.
Create priorities for what you want to accomplish motivated by your values.
Week 4: Crystallize Your Voice
Why your voice is an expression of your values.
Discover and refine, or redefine your voice.
Create a "brand" around your voice in the marketplace.
Use your voice to enhance powerful writing.
Week 5: Connect with Your Intuition
What intuition is and is not in the art and craft of writing.
How to listen to what your spirit has to say through you.
Recognize inspiration as it rises through your unconscious.
Take yourself lightly through the process and have fun with it.
Week 6: Prime Your Creative Pump
Be your own creative catalyst.
How we prime ourselves for everything else.
Excel at priming your creativity on purpose.
Exercises and humor that dissolve writers block.
Week 7: Connect with Your Highest Self.
Be enthusiastic, let positive energy lead you into new places.
What to do with writing distractions. (Arrrgh!)
Being productive even when you´re not at a keyboard.
Say Bah-Hum-Bug to nay-sayers; banish "bad mind" forever.
Week 8: Experiment with Your Writing
How playfulness influences "flow."
What do you have to lose?
Stay juicy at all times.
Follow the yellow brick road: this way, that way, both ways.
Week 9: Develop Consistency in Your Writing
Consistency of place: where you write and the sense of place in your writing.
Consistency of patterns: your work habits and daily routine as a way forward.
Consistency of purpose: weaving values, voice, intuition and creativity.
Consistency of poise: project your best and brightest in every project.
Week 10: Accelerate Momentum
Float your work out there.
Activate your own artfulness by practicing, practicing.
Keep tweaking the way you think, the way you see, the way you feel.
Share class projects with each other.
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Re-Visioning Aging: Writing about the Second Half of Life (10 weeks)
Class mission:
Ready for a cultural "hip" replacement? Sample writing from people over 50 who are influencing the world, then document your own experience to explore and transform the journey. "There is a freedom inherent in getting older, and young people sense it," says AARP magazine. "Eldercool is an effortless byproduct of the life being lived."
Class reading will inspire fresh thinking and a variety of perspective from authors James Hillman, Gail Sheehy, Depak Chopra, Christiane Northrup as well as vintage icons like Johnny Cash, Goldie Hawn, Gloria Steinem and Paul Newman.
Included in assignments will be memoir writing, documentary journalism, life reviews, fiction, poetry and human-interest non-fiction. Rev up your creative self-renewal; this class will focus on honesty of feeling and simplicity of delivery. We may not win film cameos, but we can still marvel at our own lives-and create our own souvenirs.
Weekly class assignments:
Emphasis will be on positive reinforcement in a format of mutual admiration
1. Write in response to a specific question for class discussion. Class members provide feedback on each other?s ideas through online discussion.
2. Write a short piece for potential publication (your choice: 200-1000 words) in order to practice your craft and prepare a body of work. In an environment of encouragement, class members will offer technical feedback, idea-shaping concepts to hone and polish the work, and info on potential markets.
Weeks 1 & 2: Aging in Literature, Art and Film: an overview of pop culture
Brief overview of cultural, spiritual, and scientific resources/perspectives on aging: what these mean and how they impact our lives and our culture.
What do you and I have to add to these attitudes and perspectives? What do you want to say? How does your experience shed light and wisdom on the aging process?and life itself? Validate the process for those who are impacted by negative cultural mores?
Assignments:
Each week write about one specific personal experience in your aging process. Use this practice to clarify your values and attitudes, and elicit emotions about your own life. (Emphasis on non-fiction, or fictionalize an account.)
Weeks 3 & 4: How We Remember: writing memoir or autobiographical articles and books
We'll explore the different ways we remember, philosophies behind remembering, books and movies illustrating how these are used and expressed. We create a visual life map to explore what you want to remember and what you don't. (History is not linear and neither are our lives.)
Assignments:
Each week write 1-2 vignettes about an illusive or fading memory still important to you. (Emphasis on visual writing.)
Weeks 5 & 6: Preserving our Legacy: writing ethical wills and life reviews
Documenting what moved the story-teller, what is meaningful, and helping him/her to see the minor details as significant and important. Learning to write "dribs and drabs" as coherent pieces, a microcosm of reality.
Assignments:
Write a short piece each week about a childhood or young adult experience you would like your family to know about. Choose your favorite genre. Or interview a loved one and write a piece of their story. (Emphasis on interview technique.)
Weeks 7 & 8: Redeeming the Losses through Writing: aging as a subversive activity
Going counter-culture: Identify the sacred in the ordinary, find the humor in pain, dare to raise your "aging" voice or raise your voice on aging, become a child again, enact your own writing style, design your writing career to suit yourself. Earn your right to forget, or to reframe your memories through writing. Earn every wrinkle you get by wrestling with words.
Assignments:
What do you personally dream of writing? Magazine articles? A book? A written family heirloom, documenting your own or a loved one's life? Choose what makes you feel juicy and start working on it. (Emphasis on inspirational writing and/or poetry.)
Weeks 9 & 10: Applying Stories as Salve: activate latent dreams, facilitate healing, reinvent attitudes.
Writing for today's burgeoning home caregiving industry, popular memoir market, or an increasing number of magazines and publications for an over-40 population: where will you go? Explore possibilities for becoming an expert in writing for the aging, starting your own related business, or consistently working on your own pet project.
Assignments:
Write-to-sell a piece for publication (partial piece okay for assignment). Use quotes from experts, informational data, and at least one very clear take-away. (Emphasis on documentation journalism.)
Concept questions that will lead you to clarify what you really want to do with what you've gained from this class. What's your 100 percent? Make your intention measurable. Break it down into action steps. Make a request of yourself. Hold yourself accountable and offer yourself a reward.
Just do it. Just write.
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About Marlee Ledai
MARLEE LEDAI is the author of 25 books and nearly 200 magazine/web articles. She is an independent editorial consultant and previously the editor of an award-winning magazine. Working with dozens of writers, publishers and organizations, she loves listening to people’s stories and helping them identify what sparkles in their creative projects. Travel across Europe and the Middle East was an education in human sensitivities, eventually leading Marlee to become a life coach and writing coach. Today, she writes and coaches from Silverton, Oregon, Christmas tree capital of North America, where she also loves to hike and snow board with her husband, Chip O’Brien, and to garden with her very small granddaughters next door.
Complete List of Writers.comClassesComments from Students
(The class) went beyond what I had expected. The assignments were innovative. My favorite part of the assignments were the teacher's comments on the text . They often jolted me into a new perspective... I was ecstatic over having this teacher. I could not believe how much depth she brought to her subject and how much she gave of herself during the class. Her critiques were on the mark and turned us in the right direction without being harsh. This class was obviously taught from the heart. I was also impressed wth her writing credentials. -- Deborah Klingbeil
The class was great. Marlee did a very thorough, thought provoking job. I was more and more impressed as we went along. It wasn't so much a writing class as spiritual autobiography...with the women writers of yore as jumping off points. I always recommend your classes to my friends. -- Kate Aquilino
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