Description

Foraging is a skill for finding what you need, wherever you are. In this workshop, you will build community and find what you need to deepen your writing practice. We will start each Saturday interacting with a visiting artist, learning what it means to be an artist in our local community. As we convene in our private workshop (around a table, under oak trees in Maloof’s discovery gardens), we will ground ourselves with practices that deepen our connection to the earth and to each other, so we can write from a place of rootedness. Looking to human and nonhuman communities for motivation, collaboration, and hope, we will read a variety of stories and essays, practice in-workshop writing exercises and take-home writing exercises, explore various elements of craft, and immerse ourselves in storytelling, dialoguing more honestly with ourselves, and with each other. While we can all write on our own, the choice to read and respond to each other’s work co-creates a sustainable support system, like a mycelial network, fostering conditions which allow us to grow as artists. 

Bio

Michelle Dowd is a contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TIME magazine, Alpinist, The LA Review of Books, LA Parent Mag, and other national publications. She was raised on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest where she learned to navigate by the stars and forage for edible plants. Her bestselling memoir, Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult, showcases her life growing up on an isolated mountain in California as part of an apocalyptic cult, and how she found her way out of poverty and illness by drawing on the gifts of the wilderness.