We’ll be grappling immediately with the power and the scope of the creative unconscious.

$200/$160 members for five weeks

Monday evenings through November 1

This is an ongoing Monday group. Pre-pay for 5 sessions at a time.

7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

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We’ll start with the Crazy Child exercise in the first session and that will open a very wide and previously unknown field for us. We’ll be grappling immediately with the power and the scope of the creative unconscious. The moniker “Crazy Child” is our invitation to write with abandon and let material we’d never otherwise imagine flow through us onto the page. 

Our exercises are designed to guide your Crazy Child in constructing a personal portal to  your unique creativity. We’ll enter the portal with openness and allow ourselves to write something we’d never have dared or, just as well, continue something familiar and comfortable but with new energy, insight, and confidence. We’ve been constructing and refining the exercises and using them with abundant success for more than forty years.

The creative unconscious is the source of our stories, poems, essays, memoirs, novels, and blogs. We will have both ample writing time in class and time for careful, supportive, and exhaustive feedback in developing your writing. Your facilitator has written most of these himself and has worked with expert writers in all these genres and more.

By the end of five weeks you can expect to have completed a fine work – a story, a set of poems, the first chapters of a novel or of a memoir, the first act of a play or of a film, and probably have another piece in progress. You’ll also have gained an understanding of the creative process that you can use freely and effectively in all other aspects of your creative life, in writing and in any other art.

It’s recommended that you purchase a copy of the tutorial Let the Crazy Child Write! (New World Library 1998), and follow the theory, examples, and explanations of the topics in that volume as we discuss them in class.

About Clive Matson (MFA Poetry Columbia University 1989):

Malcolm Margolin: “[T]he people I value and admire most are those who have created a space in which others can thrive. In this regard, you have no equal.”

Sarasvati Blanc: “You have propelled so many into the wild spaces that illuminate all those personal places, that blaze across the universe…. Thanks for sharing the poet’s planet with all of us.”

Meet Clive at Arlene Wohl Reception in the Loft at 6:30 p.m. on September 11!