LLWRC 786 - Get Serious: Spiritual Autobiography

What is the soul? Is it, as Mary Oliver has written, something that 'comes and goes/ like the wind over the water'? Is it a shy creature we can coax out of hiding? How do we come to know it? How do we articulate our innermost experience and the back-and-forth flow of self and world? This course will explore these questions as we begin to articulate our individual life journeys; we will then draft several scenes from our own experience to test our sense of inner truth. We will also discuss the challenges of autobiography in religious culture and family. The course will conclude with a revision workshop, so that students will be able to take these skills into their continuing work. As a companion for your studies, we ask you to purchase the text of your choice from a selected list. This list will be emailed to registered students, but includes Annie Dillard's For the Time Being; Mary Rose O'Reilley's The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd; Karen Armstrong's, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness; and Harvey Cox's Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey through the Jewish Year. The selected texts come from a variety of perspectives and tradition; we encourage you to choose one that 'speaks to your condition', as the Quakers say. If you don't find a text that relates to your tradition or experience, feel free to search for one on your own. Open to writers of all levels of experience who are confident with basic sentence structure and composition.