ENG 301 Spiritual Writing

Writing to reveal the inner self--the pilgrimage into one's spiritual and/or religious nature--is a primary calling. In his book-length essay Spirituality and the Writer, Larson surveys the literary insights of authors old and new who have shaped religious autobiography and spiritual memoir--from Augustine to Thomas Merton, from Peter Matthiessen to Cheryl Strayed.

Provides a close reading and analysis of ten major life stories by twentieth-century leaders and thinkers from a variety of religious and cultural traditions. The book uses approaches from literary criticism, developmental psychology, and spirituality. Each text is read in the light of the autobiographical tradition begun by St. Augustine's Confessions, but with a focus on distinctively modern and post-modern transformations of the self-writing genre.

Given its affinity with questions of identity, autobiography offers a way into the interior space between author and reader, especially when writers define themselves in terms of religion. In his exploration of this "textual intimacy," Wesley Kort begins with a theorization of what it means to say who one is and how one's self-account as a religious person stands in relation to other forms of self-identification. He then provides a critical analysis of autobiographical texts by nine contemporary American writers--including Maya Angelou, Philip Roth, and Anne Lamott--who give religion a positive place in their accounts of who they are.

In Inkwell, writing instructor and professor Anne Whitney shows how writing--informal, low-stakes writing, in just a few minutes a day--can be a powerful tool for your spiritual self-care. While many people are intimidated by writing, or remember writing from their school days as difficult or scary, this book offers practical, meaningful writing tools that anyone, regardless of writing experience, education, or training, can use to grow closer to God and heal spiritual wounds.

Fun and innovative exercises and prompts for creative writing students Successful creative writers from numerous genres constructed these exercises, including poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction to one-act plays, song lyrics, genre fiction, travel guides, comics and beyond. The exercises use a broad range of creative approaches, aesthetics, and voices, all with an emphasis on demystifying the writing process and having fun.

Provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the field of creative writing through its landmark terms, exploring concerns as abstract as postmodernism and identity politics alongside very practical interests of beginning writers, like contests, agents, and royalties.