Writing in the heat of summer

August 19

Our next gathering of Wrting As A Wisdom Project will be on Saturday, August 19, from 9 am to 5 pm in Greenfield.

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Space will be limited so please register soon if you would like to attend. To register, please leave a comment here, or email Catherine at neighborhoodzen@gmail.com.

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Combining meditation in the Zen tradition with the practice of imaginative writing, Writing As A Wisdom Project invites intimate and creative study of the mind. Engaging playfully with language, we write together from prompts and read aloud, listen, and respond to one another’s words. Our writings and responses are explorations, and our conversations are based in imaginative insight rather than craft or critique. The day is appropriate for participants at any level of literary or meditation experience. Meditation guidance will be offered as needed.

Please bring paper and pens, even if you are accustomed to composing on a keyboard. Please arrive by 8:45 to get settled, so that we can begin promptly at 9:00. We will take a break for lunch and everyone is encouraged to bring something (vegetarian) to share with others.

A contribution of $20 is suggested. Any donation is welcome, but is not required.

For further details or to register, please leave a comment here, or email Catherine at neighborhoodzen@gmail.com.

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Catherine Gammon is a fiction writer and Soto Zen priest, ordained in 2005 by Tenshin Reb Anderson Roshi in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki. Before beginning residential Zen training at San Francisco Zen Center’s Tassajara and Green Gulch Farm, Catherine served on the MFA faculty of the University of Pittsburgh.

Catherine’s new collection, The Gunman and the Carnival, is forthcoming from Baobab Press in 2024. Her current novel The Martyrs, The Lovers is available now on Bookshop, as well as at White Whale Bookstore and Riverstone Squirrel Hill. Catherine’s previous novels are China Blue (2021), Sorrow (2013), and Isabel Out of the Rain (1991), and her shorter fiction has appeared in literary journals for many years, and in a collection of stories from the 1970s, Beauty and the Beast (2012).

After serving as Shuso (head student) at Green Dragon Temple/Green Gulch Farm in 2010, Catherine led retreats and gave teachings in Zen and writing in the U.K., in Brooklyn, in Pittsburgh, in Massachusetts, and at SFZC’s Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. She lives again in Pittsburgh, where in 2017 she started Neighborhood Zen.