Your Words are Art (Plus, Early-Bird Baltimore Rates End Aug 1!)

If you joined us for our Write Like a Mother retreat in Minneapolis, you know how much we love to bring together the beauty of art and the craft of writing. There is no better inspiration for words to find their way to paper than the quiet stillness of a museum.

So with our early-bird discount for this October’s Write Like a Mother retreat in Baltimore expiring this Saturday, August 1, I thought I’d share some behind-the-scenes thoughts on how I build our writing experiences inside museums, as well as a few bonus prompts from our time in Minneapolis.

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Curators lay out museums not to be showcases for one single work of art (sorry, Starry Night peepers at MOMA), but as immersive experiences. Curators are storytellers. One gallery leads to another, as does one floor and then one wing. The entire museum is an experiential story that is also a beautiful, collective work of art.

And so is our writing.

We all craft juicy, delicious sentences, but none of them are Starry Night at MOMA. They do not exist alone. They are meant to meander alongside so many other beautiful pieces of prose. So when I imagine how writers will journey through a museum, I walk the museum myself and see how we may experience different works of art together. Maybe thematically. Perhaps aesthetically? Absolutely through several combinations thereof! So that however inspiration strikes for you in that particular moment on that arbitrary day, you can seize it with both hands.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (or MiA as it is affectionately known) is my hometown museum. It is also my creative happy place. I was thrilled and more than a little nervous to show it off when we retreated in Minneapolis two years ago. I created a book for our participants to use through the museum, which they also took home for further inspiration. Other museum visitors stopped them to ask where they could get their own copy. “Sorry,” they replied. “You need to sign up for a Write Like a Mother retreat.”

Here’s a sample, just for our followers here:

I’m still based in Minneapolis, but when I was in Baltimore for a writing conference in March, I took myself on a date to the Baltimore Museum of Art. I walked the space.

At our retreat this October–after generative writing sessions with Christine Platt and Glory Edim, after Reiki and healing with Emiy Souder, after a day and a half of retreating and writing and connecting–we will once again introduce our sentences to some masterworks of art. We can choose themes of protection, perspective, or preparation. We may interpret artists’ visions of obsession or consider their fixations against other artists’ backdrops of playfulness and a sense of place. Or we may simply choose to find space in the purposeful quiet of a museum to tap into all the sentences that have spoken to us over our time retreating together.