Friends, feelers, seekers, and revelers:

What is Wild Writing?

The structure is simple, and the writing is transformative, whether we are alchemizing the mundane into the miraculous or traversing the terrain of love, loss, and the full spectrum of our human existence.

Call it a come-as-you-are practice, a permission practice, a presence practice, a communing with your creative unconscious practice, a listening practice, a receiving practice, a writing ritual, a healing modality, and a clearing exercise; the writing that happens here isn’t designated to those who call themselves writers; it’s for all of us.

I call it Four Chambers Writing in honor of the four chambers of our heart, the terrain we explore in our time together, but its origin is Wild Writing™, a lauded practice created by my beloved teacher Laurie Wagner.  

“When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.”

—Joy Harjo

What do we do?

We meet via Zoom or in person for ninety minutes or two hours, depending on the series you’ve joined. All you ever need is a notebook and your favorite writing utensil (yes, we write with our actual hands). 

During each class, we have three opportunities to write, each time using poetry as our muse, selected by me. We listen, I offer jump-off lines (sparks or prompts), I reread the poem and repeat the same lines, and then we write for a period of somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes. I keep track of time while writing with you and give two-minute and one-minute warnings as we approach the end of each writing session.

This practice isn’t about final drafts but about discovery. We write as quickly as we can, letting whatever comes up come down onto the page. We invite our inner critic and editor to take a much-needed rest while we follow the thread guiding us through our respective writing. You’ll be amazed at what arrives.

Then we read, going around the group one by one, listening with our ears, eyes, and hearts. This is not a perfecting process; in fact, perfection lies in the simplicity and circular nature of the structure—we listen, we write, we read, we receive, and we show our gratitude. 

That’s all we have to do:

Show up, listen, write, read, receive, repeat!

At the end of our sessions, if we are stirred by something someone has shared, we ask first, ‘May I reference your writing?’ before commenting or questioning further.