Liminal Writing Online w/ Sonya Lea

Launches Sunday February 17 Online

Four Weeks in Length

Writing The Liminal

Liminal means threshold, and liminal experiences are transitional, a suspension in identity, time, or community. We’ll write our way into dreams, ritual, wilderness, birth, death, visions, ghosts, tricksters, crossroads, revolutions, and all kinds of collapses of the status quo. You’ll come away with tools to help you work with your liminal experiences in writing.

Week one: Definitions of thresholds, threshold/outlier experiences, and an observation of what is happening outside consensus reality. The liminal may be a way for us to hold and access another deeper reality that is often outside our view. We are not actually a fixed identity, a fixed narrative. What do you know of the liminal spaces of life? We’ll take a look at:

• Dreams, Ritual, Lifedeath Liminality (Birth/Death), Ancestral Connections
• The Trickster, Ghosts, Borders, Crossroads.
• Nature & Wilderness, solstices/equinoxes, twilight.
• Dissolution of a society: revolutions, crises, collapses of order.

Week two: Explore narratives that are about marginalized others, outliers, and the stranger.

• The thirteenth fairy, The Left Hand of Darkness and the work of Clarice Lispector.

Week three: Entering into liminality to write. The importance of silence and solitude to finding liminal space. In nature, especially in wild places you finding a balance between alertness and giving yourself over to the liminalspace.

• Liminality as unstable, meaning something will be heightened. The practice of observing this carefully.
• Experiments with liminality, and threshold

Week four:

• How language evolves to make space for the liminal experience, using the work of Toni Morrison in Beloved and Annie Dillard to explore.

Sonya Lea’s memoir, Wondering Who You Are was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and has garnered praise in Oprah Magazine, People, and the BBC, who named it a “top ten book.” Her essays have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Salon, The Southern Review, Brevity, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and more. Lea teaches writing online and in person, including to women veterans through the Red Badge Project. She lives in Seattle and the Canadian Rockies. Find her at www.wonderingwhoyouare.com.