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Teresa
Cutler
BA - English/Anthropology
MA - Cultural Studies/Comparative Literature
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Scrivere in Italia!
or What good are Writing Workshops?
by Teresa Cutler
With our upcoming writing workshop and retreat in Bolsena, Italy, Paolo and I are both fielding questions like the above. In essence, people wonder why they should attend a writing retreat and/or workshop at all. What good will it do? What will they get there that they can’t get in their own homes?
Writing workshops offer not only the actual, obvious time away and exploration of self, but in the very combination of these things in a new place, they offer a brand new space in which creation has no choice but to begin. Writers – indeed, all artists – when surrounded by new tastes, new sounds, new experiences, often find that ideas and creative energy bubble to the surface in response. In essence, a writing retreat or writing workshop is a new space, an empty space, and the creative self fills that space with art.
So that’s the metaphysical answer.
On a practical level, writing retreats help writers focus; the daily seminars, workshops and field trips, and the time spent talking with fellow writers in the evenings, can shake up expectations, provide new perspectives, ask questions in exciting ways – and the result is entirely new ways of thinking about how to put words to page.
Once you’ve decided that a writing retreat is a good idea, the question then becomes:
Why a workshop/retreat in Italy, instead of one closer to home? The answer is many-fold. On one level one could argue that because Italy is so far from home, so outside your experience, so new, that it can’t help but be a perfect place to explore new way to think about writing. And while this is indeed true, I think there’s a deeper answer.
Simply put, it’s about Inspiration. Italy, even today in the 21st century world of Globalization, Western influence, and tourists who can reach almost anywhere, still retains its core of antiquity. And this is what makes writing in Italy so different – the power of the ancient world is alive and well – and you can tap into it in the form of a Muse.
The classical world was the home of the gods and goddesses first attributed with the power to inspire. The word Muse comes from the classical world, its definition the goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like. Two of them specifically inspired what in the ancient world was equivalent to today’s novels, essays and poetry: Calliope (epic poetry), and Erato (lyric poetry). These Muses still haunt Italy; you have only to look.
Scrivere in Italia! offers daily excursions to nearby ancient towns, short seminars by writers and photographers, hours to write uninterrupted or to brainstorm with fellow writers, and time to seek out and explore your own personal Muse – and you can find them around every corner, in every ancient cathedral, along the narrow streets and echoing through the night.
So why a workshop? To give you the time and space to write. And why Italy? To find your Muse. Indeed, writing without a Muse is possible, writers do it all the time. But when you find one – when an ancient road rolls out from the past into the future, when that sip of wine from ancient vineyards rolls across your tongue, or when the words roll off the tip of your fingers and out into the world – you’ll create magic.
Scrivere in Italia! shows you how.
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