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Experiential Writing as Spiritual Practice

  • Minnesota Zen Meditation Center 3343 East Calhoun Parkway Minneapolis, MN, 55408 United States (map)

$70 for members of a Twin Cities Zen Center; $90 for nonmembers
Vegetarian lunch included.
Please register early; space is limited.
Register for workshop.

Norman will be spend the day with participants exploring how the ineffable silence of Zen can be evoked by the scratch of a pen. He will be drawing on the distilled insights of forty years of writing practice combined with Zen meditation drawing on material from his new book Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion.

Both Buddhist priest and participant in avant-garde poetry's Language movement, Norman will explore with participants the fertile affinities and creative contradictions between Zen and writing.

He will explore a variety of themes which include: time, the Heart Sutra, God in the Hebrew psalms, the supreme "uselessness" of art making, "late work" as a category of poetic appreciation, and the subtle and dubious notion of "religious experience."

Through lectures, discussion, and exercises, participants may discover how language is not a description of experience, but rather an experience itself: shifting, indefinite, and essential.

More info: Minnesota Zen Meditation Center