June 3-5, 2005
Proprioceptive Writing (PW) is a path to emotional health, spiritual renewal, and better writing. It is a simple but powerfully effective method for exploring the psyche through writing that anyone can learn. Widely recognized as an adjunct to the healing arts and as a form of meditation, PW is practiced to music in twenty-minute sessions, under stress-free conditions, alone or in groups. Through a process we call “Inner Hearing,” PW teaches you to listen to your thoughts with empathy and curiosity and reflect on them in writing. Practiced regularly, PW increases awareness, confidence, self-trust, improves memory, and promotes creativity.
PW is also valuable to people who wish to write and for writers facing impediments to their work. It returns you to the pleasures of pure process, reminding you why you wanted to write to begin with. Through practice, you get personal with your subject matter and over time collect a rich storehouse of raw material that you can draw on for your writing projects. Taught by the creator of PW, this workshop will help you open to yourself, explore your experience, release your voice, and live a calmer, more expressive life.
Linda Trichter Metcalf, author and educator, has been hailed as “an original thinker in the field of creativity.” In the mid-1970s, Linda created the practice now known as Proprioceptive Writing (PW), while a professor of English at Pratt Institute. In 1982, she and her partner, Tobin Simon, gave up faculty positions to found the Proprioceptive Writing Center in Maine and Dr. Metcalf began to teach PW as a method of therapy. Since then, she’s taught PW at the New School University, Esalen Institute, the New York Open Center, and many other places. In 1996 she and Toby moved the center to New York City where she teaches group and online classes in PW, conducts PW therapy, is a consultant to writers and other artists, and leads the PW Teacher Certification Program. She is the author (with Tobin Simon) of Writing the Mind Alive: The Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice, which is recommended reading for this workshop.
“Proprioceptive Writing is shockingly, uncannily liberating. An enthralling, surprising journey into the self.” —Stephen Levine, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry
“PW helped me forge the connections between my intellect, my heart, and my pen that eventually became Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, a work that I couldn’t have dreamed possible when I started Proprioceptive Writing.” —Christiane Northrup, M.D.