Creative Writing As Soul Work

What happens when our habitual ways of accessing guidance or illumination within the unconscious no longer speak to us? When refocused, writing can become the royal road of soul, a form of the transcendent function. This kind of writing needs to have its own container, its own preparations, and its own special state of mind. In this practice we will create an absolute, tough-minded time/space alone, open to reverie, to no-thing, to no idea, which at times is an almost unsustainable passive receptivity. John Keats named it negative capability. Rather than a product-making process, the intention becomes soul work. We feed this nothing with something which defies a name, something that initiates a response. A phrase comes from nowhere and leads where we never expected to be. How do we nourish it? What can stir the unconscious to speak to us? Stowell will use her own work as an illustration, selecting a few entries from her book A Cast of Coins to show when the writing shifted into this deeper process