Course Description

Writing for reflection, Resilience, and Joy

In a world that feels ever more overwhelming and uncertain, we pine for solidity, clarity, and inner resilience. This workshop invites us to explore the transformative power of writing as a practice that helps us listen more deeply to the "still, small voice within." We'll use writing as a creative instrument for connecting the myriad and often mysterious strands of our inner and outer worlds, a reflective catalyst for making our self-discoveries more legible, buoyant, and joyful.

In the spirit of curiosity, playfulness, and non-attachment, we'll write to build bridges between past experiences and present emotions, resisting the flat narrative, the dominant account, the single story. Instead, we'll honor the more elusive tangles at the roots of the stories we tell ourselves and others, discovering moments of insight and delight along the way.

We'll seek to better integrate these stories and thicken our texts with greater honesty, nuance, and clarity; to reconcile the parts of our experiences that we've left or kept unstoried as a means of continued engagement with an evolving and more integrated sense of ourselves. This process invites not only healing but joy—the satisfaction that comes from witnessing our own growth and connecting more authentically with our whole selves. In this time of rapid change, directing our attention in this way generates not just acts of self-discovery, but offers a vital tool for building resilience, navigating uncertainty, and practicing joy.

Participants will be invited to engage throughout the weekend with an intentional series of short readings and reflective prompts, afforded time for quiet writing and contemplation, and provided space to meaningfully share their writing and insights 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.