INSTRUCTOR: Rebecca Spears
TIME: Saturday, July 15, 1:00–4:00 p.m. CST
PRICE: Early bird price: $45 for members, $60 for nonmembers. The deadline for early bird pricing is Monday, July 9. After Monday, July 9: $55 for members, $70 for nonmembers. Become a member here. Apply for a scholarship here.
LOCATION: Online via Zoom
LEVEL: All Levels
CAP: 15
Every tree has its heartwood, a core of supporting wood. On its exterior, each tree reveals hardened knots, formed as the tree trunk grows and swallows small branches. These gnarls grow stronger as every new layer of trunk is added. Eventually, they are as hard as ironwood.
When trees that line a river or lake begin to die, their woody mass, including the heartwood, falls away, and only these gnarls remain. Water washes and polishes the burls so that they come to resemble teeth, riverteeth. Essayist David James Duncan has suggested that our significant memories are like these riverteeth. That is, while our years and experience accumulate, what remains in our memories are “shocks” of joy or grief, empathy, honesty, terror, deep longing —years after other memories have dropped away.
In this workshop, you will spend some time along the edges of your experiences to examine the riverteeth, exploring the images and remembering the sometimes unexpected particulars. You will have a chance to work with one or several of these moments, and examine its relationship to your heartwood—core elements of your personality and perspectives.
Come join with fellow writers as we hew into new materials via the riverteeth. With new images and details in mind, you will begin organizing and drafting a personal essay that will polish those riverteeth into gems, to reflect your heartwood.