2025 Summer Workshop Program

Seema Reza Six Senses: Rituals of Creativity and Surprise June 15 to June 20, 2025 Time 9 am - 12 pm Discipline: Multi-Genre Open To All On-site Housing NOT Available - Off-site Housing Options

This is a generative workshop for emerging and established memoirists, poets, and those writing in hybrid/experimental forms seeking strategies to access new perspectives and truths in their writing. Reading and discussing contemporary poetry, hybrid forms, and short essays/excerpts, we’ll find new angles on familiar stories. We’ll use writing prompts combined with meditation and visualization to uncover sensorial detail that deepens insights, discovering and giving voice to ‘what you don’t know you know.’ Over the course of the week, we will build a practice of observation, wonder, and porousness that will infuse our creative work. Each session will include a writing period, where writers will respond to 2-3 writing prompts, and a discussion period, which will consist of an opportunity to share writing, observations, and ask questions. We will close with a meditation. Writers may come prepared with a topic or topics they’d like fresh perspective on, or with nothing but an open mind. A week at FAWC is an enormous gift to give one’s creative life, and this workshop is designed to help writers make the most of it. You’ll leave with tools to use again and again to create a disciplined and reliable practice of surprising oneself.

Biography

Seema Reza is the author of the books A Constellation of Half-Lives and When the World Breaks Open. She is the CEO of Community Building Art Works, a non-profit organization that brings workshops led by professional artists to service members, veterans, and clinicians and is featured in the 2018 HBO documentary We Are Not Done Yet. Her writing has been widely anthologized and has appeared in the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The LA Review, LitHub and Electric Literature among others.