WORKSHOP: The Shape of Your Attention with Michelle Dowd
WORKSHOP: The Shape of Your Attention with Michelle Dowd
This workshop is taught by guest teacher and Inner Room member Michelle Dowd.
Michelle grew up in a high-control religious cult. She survived it, left it, and then learned how to write toward it—how to find language for the thing that shaped her before she had words for what it was. Her memoir Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult marks what it looks like when a writer finally names the thing she’s been circling her whole life.
In The Shape of Your Attention, we’ll practice paying attention to our own attention, mining the writers who influenced us and discovering how the subjects that won’t leave us alone can become a compass for our creative lives.
No preparation needed. Come as you are.
Michelle Dowd is a journalism professor and contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TIME magazine, Alpinist, and other national publications. She was raised on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest where she learned to identify flora and fauna, navigate by the stars, forage for edible plants, and care for the earth. Her memoir, Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult, showcases her life growing up on an isolated mountain in California as part of an apocalyptic cult, and how she found her way out of poverty and illness by drawing on the gifts of the wilderness.