Every writer faces self-doubt, pressure, isolation, the requirement to master craft, and the longing to know that your words matter.  The struggle to know in your bones that you are good enough is a real struggle, but not one answered simply by being published. What does it really mean to be a writer and why does it matter? What kind of life are you called to as a writer? What deeper need lies behind that longing to write something important? In this address Lancia E. Smith, names the questions that writers yearn for answers to and with her inimitable style offers a resounding validation to those called to bear a message as a way of life and spurring us on to cultivate a true writer’s life.

A pretty deep dive into Narnia-specific essays “Three Ways,” “Sometimes Fairy Tales,” and especially “On Stories,” to glean how Lewis desired the Chronicles to be written,  read, and lived. 

What is the aim of our writing? Why aren’t we content to let writing be a private hobby, and what, exactly, do we expect it to be instead?

When we begin to act on that persistent inner prompting to write, we often have some end in mind. Notions of publishing deals, bestseller lists, speaking tours, literary awards, high-profile interviews, or film options jostle for our imaginative attention and distract from the project beneath our pen. These phantasms creep round the edges of our mental landscape, taunting and troubling us with ill-defined dreams.

But who taught us to want these things? What does attaining them look like? What effect does chasing them, even in daydreams, have on our writing, and more importantly, on us as writers?

In this session, we’ll take a sober look at the writing-industrial complex and at ourselves to become “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” seeking the inner renewal and transformation that will ennoble us to act as prophets and priests, baptizers and redeemers, heralds and ambassadors in the world of professional writing.

There is a certain wildness in the way Lewis dared to depict big themes, but never at the expense of effective prose.  Drawing from his fiction and literary essays, we will discuss how C. S. Lewis expressed bold ideas about God, life, love, and the imagination in clear and moving prose.  We will discuss just how Lewis was able to communicate abstract ideas through concrete language as well as engage in experiential exercises to embody practical writing tips.

Like everything on this side of Eden, community does not always come easily. The ‘thistles and thorns’ that curse the ground after the fall can grow in relationships too. For those of us with strong imaginations, sensitive spirits, and impulses that bend toward introversion, sometimes making worlds in our mind or on paper or on a canvas feels safer than living in the real one with real people. In this class we will acknowledge both ache and need that reminds us that what was spoken from the beginning is still true today: “it is not good for man to be alone”.

Explore the vast resource of God’s creation to help inspire your own creativity. See how the act of creativity is woven into the fabric of theology.

From the time I was a young girl, I felt deeply that I wanted to communicate ideas and inspiration to change my world. For the last 60 years, doors have opened in myriad ways to give me opportunities beyond what I could have imagined. My hope is that there will be life and encouragement from my story that will give courage to others who have such dreams.

Tackle the core elements that make up every successful book project. 

Good writing is an art. On the canvas of paper or pixels, it is skillfully and imaginatively using the living lines of language, the mercurial colors of words, and the careful composition of sentences to tell a story that only you can tell. The art of good writing does not happen by accident; it emerges from a heart cultivated with a love for the life of writing. In many ways, good writing is an incarnation in words of the heart of the writer. In this session we will briefly explore four taproots of the serious writer’s life—Character, Creativity, Craft, and Community—to discover how writing as a work of heart becomes the writer’s work of art.

Just as it is out of the overflow of the heart that the mouth sings, so it is by the overflow of the heart’s joy that the soul sings. And if we, as writers, wish to inspire our readers to sing, or if we wish to fill their hearts with wonder, we must begin with the wonder that is in our own souls. In this session, author and educator, Junius Johnson, offers a guided discussion aimed at exploring our blockages and dry spots as writers then looks at the practices and principles that help us keep our own wonder tanks filled. This interactive class will prepare you to take command of your daily and weekly routines and more consistently find your own place of inspiration.”

We were not meant to write alone. As deep calls unto deep, our souls are formed by and for connection with others, and the same is true of our writing. As we work to cultivate our craft, God is deep at work making a masterpiece of us. And both are worked out in relationship. In this session, we will explore some foundational practices for cultivating intimate community such as building safety and connection, how to give and receive feedback, and naming some common barriers we all face in forming true and lasting connection – all so we might spur one another on to do the good works He has planned for us long ago.

Some Christian and mainstream cultures promote an emotional prosperity gospel that stifles a broad swath of human experience. In this session, poet Amy Malskeit will lead us in discovering an invitation and a practice rooted in the Psalms, to befriend the fullness of our human experience in God’s presence. Drawing from poets such as Levertov, L’Engle and Oliver, we will write in concert with Psalms that will help us orient ourselves in The Story, finding ourselves invited to cultivate our own humanity, and as we write, invite others to do the same.

Along pilgrimage routes such as the Camino de Santiago, an “infrastructure of hospitality” grew up in the Middle Ages and beyond. Locals built inns, hostels, hospitals, bridges, etc., for the comfort, refreshment, safety, and healing of the pilgrims who passed through their corner of the world. Then they sent the travelers on, entrusting them to the care of inn-keepers, hospitallers, and bridge-builders further down the path. This infrastructure of hospitality provides a helpful way to think about our work as writers: in tending to the little patch of earth that has been entrusted to us, we provide welcome, refreshment, perhaps even healing for the fellow-pilgrims who need what we can give.