The Examined Life Courses

• Do you ever ask: what’s it all for?  What does it mean?
• Do you ever feel like there is something bigger in your life?  Something you glimpse but that remains elusive, not yet fully formed or clear to you?
• Do you find yourself standing at a crossroad, unsure which direction to take?

The Examined Life courses embrace these moments of deep inner reflection as exciting opportunities to know ourselves more deeply and live more fully in our purpose and meaning.

• The Introductory course, The Examined Life I: Writing, Healing, and the Voice of the Inner Self, is for people who want to explore writing as way to make sense of themselves and their lives.
• The Advanced Course, The Examined Life II: Manifesting, is for people who are ready to turn their making-sense-through-writing into a crafted work to share with the larger world.

Both courses use writing as a medium, a conduit, a resource for understanding ourselves, clarifying our life’s meaning and purpose, and reaching our highest potential.

The Examined Life I: Writing, Healing, and the Voice of the Inner Self

For those who have wanted to write but have not known how or where to start, The Examined Life I: Writing, Healing, and the Voice of the Inner Self will help you

• Learn how to use writing as a resource and a practice for clarifying the big questions of your life.
• Develop deep listening and mindful awareness skills that help you hear more clearly your inner voice.
• Define your writing genre, style, and voice.

In The Examined Life I: Writing, Healing, and the Voice of the Inner Self, I work with you to explore your life’s big questions as opportunities to grow and evolve. Sometimes our growth moments come from major life transitions, or from those moments when we look at the trajectory our lives have taken so as to make sense of where we’ve been and re-imagine where we’re going. Whenever we find ourselves re-thinking our meaning and purpose in life, writing can help us hear more clearly the voice of the inner self calling to us.

The Structure

As your guide, I offer you all of the resources and expertise of a university course, but meet you as a coach and a resource. In my life as a Professor of Writing and Culture and an expert in memory and trauma studies, I spent 2 decades teaching courses such as Writing and Healing, Writing for Publication, Writing for Social Justice, and Narrative, Memory and Identity.  The Examined Life I: Writing, Healing, and the Voice of the Inner Self brings the methods and resources from my university teaching to you in a 12-week program that offers:

• Daily writing prompts, reminders, and engagement opportunities in our course discussion forum.
• Weekly writing goals that break writing down into sequences and stages and help you keep your writing focus.
• Bi-weekly live sessions where we workshop your writing and you receive one-on-one writing coaching.
• Readings, resources, and writing tools for every stage of your writing and thinking.
• A writing community with 24/7 online access through the course portal to all course content.

The Process

While I offer you the structure and resources to support you in your writing journey, the journey is yours: I serve as your companion, coach, facilitator, mentor, champion. In a safe, stimulating, and inspiring space, I

• Support you in deeply listening to your own inner voice.
• Bear witness to what is emerging in and through your writing.
• Think with you – about ideas, about writing questions, about life and its meaning.
• Provide the structure and resources you need to bring your inner world to life in writing.

You can read about my own journey towards an examined life in my first book, The Wars We Inherit: Military Life, Gender Violence, and Memory.  Following the call of the deeper Self beckoning me, I left the university to work with civil society in the Western Balkans, trained as a collective trauma facilitator, and am a trauma-informed and transformational coach.  As your facilitator, I bring my rich and diverse experience to you, as needed, to create a safe, stimulating, and inspiring space, where I support you as you deeply listen to your own inner voice and bear witness to what is emerging in and through your writing.

Fee:

Option 1: One-time payment of $450.00

Option 2: 4 payments of $112.50

To find out more or to join a writing cohort, schedule a free discovery call here.

The Examined Life II: Manifesting

The Examined Life II: Manifesting helps you to clarify what is calling to you, hone your voice, find the form your writing wants to take, and refine your writing style. Focusing on what you want to write, who you want to write it for, and what you want your writing to accomplish brings you into a deeper relation to both yourself and your imagined audience. This course is for:

• Those who have completed The Examined Life I: Writing, Healing, and the Voice of the Inner Self and want to continue their writing journey.
• Those who, for some time already, have been using writing as a way to tune into their inner voice and are ready to give shape and life to the deeper Self that has been emerging.

Cues that this course will help you manifest in writing what is calling to you include:

• You find that writing helps you sort out what you are thinking and feeling.
• You do not think of yourself as “writer,” but you write.
• You feel like you have something in you to say, and are itching to give it voice and shape.
• You write for yourself - journaling, poetry, stories, essays – and are ready to begin sharing your writing with others.
• Writing is a process of discovery for you, revealing things as you write that you were not consciously aware of until they poured out of you and onto the page.

The Structure

As your guide, I offer you all of the resources and expertise of a university course, but meet you as a coach and a resource. In my life as a Professor of Writing and Culture and an expert in memory and trauma studies, I spent 2 decades teaching courses such as Writing and Healing, Writing for Publication, Writing for Social Justice, and Narrative, Memory and Identity.  The Examined Life II: Manifesting brings the methods and resources from my university teaching to you in a 12-week program that offers:

• Daily writing prompts, reminders, and engagement opportunities in our course discussion forum.
• Weekly writing goals that break writing down into sequences and stages and help you keep your writing focus.
• Bi-weekly live sessions where we workshop your writing and you receive one-on-one writing coaching.
• Readings, resources, and writing tools for every stage of your writing and thinking.
• A writing community with 24/7 online access through the course portal to all course content.

The Process

I serve as your companion, coach, facilitator, mentor, and champion over the course of our 12 weeks working to give shape and form to your writing project.  In addition to offering live sessions, writing workshops, personalized feedback, and writing resources and practices specific to your needs, I will help you discover:

• What you want to produce as a result of our work.  Do you want a life story to pass on as a legacy to family and friends? A poetry chapbook that you want to print and distribute? Do you want to launch your own online writing platform? Do you want to integrate photographs, art, and images with your writing? What is calling to you to be expressed in writing and what form does this writing want to take?
• Who will receive your work?  Family, friends, colleagues? Your church, community organizations, or social groups? The wider reading public?
• How will they receive your work?  In traditional print forms? Digitally? As a performance - in a public reading, or as a performance? Will your work be multimedia, combining several different forms?
• What you hope your work will do for the people who receive it.

Over the course of our 12 week journey, you will:

• Complete a draft of your writing project.
• Clarify how you want to produce and distribute your work, and who will receive it.
• Have an action plan for your next steps (revising and completing your work; form that the final work will take; when, with whom, and how the work will be shared).

You can read about my own journey towards an examined life in my first book, The Wars We Inherit: Military Life, Gender Violence, and Memory.  Following the call of the deeper Self beckoning me, I left the university to work with civil society in the Western Balkans, trained as a collective trauma facilitator, and am a trauma-informed and transformational coach.  As your facilitator, I bring my rich and diverse experience to you, as needed, to create a safe, stimulating, and inspiring space, where I support you as you deeply listen to your own inner voice and bear witness to what is emerging in and through your writing.

Fee:

Option 1: One-time payment of $450.00

Option 2: 4 payments of $112.50

To find out more or to join a writing cohort, schedule a free discovery call here.