Ashlar Writing Programs:
The Personal Story
Memory is not a recollection of facts. It’s a storyteller’s canvas.
Frank Delaney, Tipperary
Ashlar Writing Programs offer you time, a place to write about your life and direction to get to your authentic voice. Writing gives your life a place to speak to you. As you write you may find, as others have, that many of the stories you tell in our rushed world are shorthand for a depth and richness that can only emerge by giving yourself the time to settle down and into your story.
Writing your life allows you the opportunity to rediscover yourself. And don’t forget fun – there is much delight and joy that gets buried at the bottom of the trunk that you keep in that attic of self. Ultimately, your story is your treasure and your writing is a treasure hunt.
Each workshop covers a different life theme in a series of specific life stages, and provides you with a workable format so that you can continue writing successfully on your own.
Raising Our Voices, Writing Our Lives
Ashlar’s Elder Writing
Ashlar Writer’s Word Jazz Theater
Writing Cures for PTSD
Writing for Peace: Community Building Workshops
Ashlars’ workshops are different from other writing groups in that you learn a format that is very precise, with exercises structured so that all writing done in the workshop is moving towards a larger individual autobiography. We make use of such concepts as curiosity and non-judgment in terms of the stories that emerge in the writing. You will hear us say: here’s how you access the creative impulse, allow it entrance; stay connected to the deep creative core; see what story longs to be told.
Ashlar: The stone is the basis for “Stone Soup,” a folktale where, through charm & benign trickery, people create a good hearty soup with nothing but a pot of water and a stone.
At Ashlar, we are interested in your story. Always have been. We are insatiably curious about who you are at depth, which is why we keep doing this. We never get bored with your stories – OK, so we don’t want to hear the same one over and over - but then, neither do you. We are interested in finding unexpected stories, shaping, changing and using stories to save our lives.
As you write, you will find many pieces you’ve forgotten or compartmentalized. You’ll find night-dreams and daydreams you’ve carried for a long time but haven’t take seriously or haven’t shared even with yourself. Traumatic events may show up. You will explore how history has contained and colored your life. Events, you haven’t fully explored or integrated or people you have forgotten will come up on the page to surprise you.
Stories teach as well as entertain. They map our lives as we live them, and in the end they are our legacy. We look to ancient stories for guidance and wisdom and to contemporary stories for their ancient themes. It is Deep Story that calls us to adventure as it has called all people, cross-culturally down through time. How do we do this? Stay tuned. Answer The Call!
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