Writing

Course Description: Writing as Attentional Practice: Cultivating Resilience and Joy

This workshop invites us to use writing as an attentional practice: a way of reclaiming and cultivating the kind of presence that sustains artful living, resilience, and joy. No matter our craft—whether shaping clay, turning wood, pruning apple trees, or preparing a meal—we are all practicing the same essential act: sustained, purposeful attention. More than something we spend or consume, our attention is an offering, an expression of our humanity, our care, and our love. When we choose where and how we direct it, we practice living with deeper intention.

Writing is offered here as a quiet, accessible way to practice that choice—not for productivity or performance, but for care: an organic, generative tool that sets language in motion, catalyzing thought, memory, and imagination. Through short writing practices and shared reflection, we’ll treat writing as an “attention sanctuary”: a small, protected space where focus can settle, where language can move with curiosity and play, and where we can follow it, without urgency, into unexpected territory, allowing meaning to emerge at its own pace.

Our writing begins close to the ground. We start with places we’re drawn to remember: writing into what happened, what it felt like to be there, and what we noticed in our bodies and our surroundings. From these lived narratives, we gradually turn toward reflection, asking what these stories might mean, what they reveal about what we value, and what they ask of us now. In this dance between story and insight, writing becomes a practice of attention in motion: learning when to follow, when to lead, and how to stay present to what’s unfolding.

No prior writing experience is required. You do not need to think of yourself as a “writer” or an “artist” to join. This workshop welcomes anyone curious about the artfulness of their attention, the places in their lives where they strive to lean in with care, intention, presence, and devotion. Writing here is simply a creative tool for noticing and tending to those places.

This is not a workshop about fixing ourselves or producing polished work. Rather, it is an invitation to engage with writing as a practice grounded in curiosity and sustained attention, and in a willingness to see where that attention might lead. We trust that noticing, listening, and staying present can generate not only greater clarity, but a steadier sense of resilience, a more spacious and durable joy, and a deeper sense of connection to our work, to one another, and to ourselves through our shared human capacity to attend.

Participants will be invited to engage throughout the weekend with an intentional sequence of short readings and generative writing prompts, time for quiet reflection, and opportunities to share—as much or as little as feels right—among good company.

About the Instructors: Curt and Nani Nehring Bliss

Curt and Nani Nehring Bliss are avid readers and writers who harbor a special love for the reflective impulse. With over 50 years’ experience between them as educators, instigators, and hosts, Curt has long served as a professor of English and Humanities at Finger Lakes Community College in Canandaigua, New York, where Nani has also enjoyed a decades-long career in service to writing- and values-based initiatives campus wide, and extends these commitments to support initiatives nationwide. They owe much of their interest and innovation as reflective practitioners to Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking where both were trained and Curt remains as a Faculty Associate and member of the Institute’s Advisory Board. Beyond academics, Curt and Nani co-conspire to tender the sweet life in the Finger Lakes where they keep showing up, just your good neighbors doing their best to live lightly and make from scratch, to school and un-school, to cultivate and rewild, to make music and merry. And, if they’re lucky... to inspire an occasional moment of grace in this world of endless change.