Longevity of Practice and Facing Intrusions Using (Soma)tic Rituals

Longevity of Practice and Facing Intrusions Using (Soma)tic Rituals

Please join us to explore how (Soma)tic Rituals can help us see the creative viability in everything around us. CAConrad has created writing rituals using the night sky to design homemade star constellations, another ritual to dream with crows, and many others, from talking with trees and ghosts, translating Shakespeare's sonnets with crystals, and coping with the destroyed wilderness of our planet.

For over 50 years, CA has been writing poetry. In that time, they have known many brilliant artists who stopped doing their work for various reasons, from being overwhelmed by jobs and family, to disappointments with the reception of their art. Using (Soma)tic Rituals can keep us vibrating on our creative frequency, no matter what challenges lie ahead. Although CA uses the rituals for writing, they can work with any artistic discipline.

This workshop will focus on Intrusions, which often come from outside negative criticism of our art, which can interrupt our ability to create. These voices can echo inside us in times of crisis, and they shut many artists down. We will practice using rituals to remove the intrusions from the body, like a Creativity Exorcism. (Soma)tic Rituals can be used to remain focused, always treating our creativity like a vital organ.

Former US-Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in The New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."