kindness workshop

Kindness and Gratitude Prompts_Possible Submission of Piece for Publication

Astoria, NSP Meditations, Writing , , , , , , ,

Ten of us gathered last Saturday in Astoria and went through a wonderful session of writing and discussing kindness and gratitude. This workshop was advance preparation for submitting pieces of prose or poetry on kindness and gratitude for inclusion into a small print publication that will be released in late spring. We dubbed our group The League of Intertidal Writers and everyone seems excited about the prospect of publishing our thoughts and getting them out to the larger world. If someone reading this is interested in submitting a short piece (100 words max), please contact me through the blog. We’d love to have more voices. Should your piece be chosen for publication, there is a small fee to join The League to help defray the printing costs. Below are the prompts we wrote on and discussed in the workshop.

Kindness and Gratitude Prompts (2018) Choose one, several, or all and respond. Merging one or more responses may produce an interesting piece of writing.

Kindness

  1. An act of kindness you remember
  2. A time you acted in kindness
  3. A time you observed an act of kindness
  4. A future act of kindness you want to perform
  5. A failure of kindness on your part (or our culture)
  6. A need for kindness
  7. Must kindness be acknowledged?
  8. A kind thought
  9. Respond to this: kill them with kindness
  10. Should acts of kindness have desired outcomes?
  11. Random acts of kindness vs strategic ones
  12. Secret kindness
  13. Greatest act of kindness in American history
  14. Can kindness be taught or modeled?
  15. What is best? Quality or quantity when it comes to acts of kindness.
  16. The most simple act of kindness
  17. Is authentic kindness possible through social media, text messaging, email?
  18. What’s a kindness experiment you could implement?
  19. What’s a visual symbol or logo for kindness?

Gratitude

  1. What is gratitude?
  2. Is there a proper or improper way to show or accept gratitude?
  3. Whom or what do you need to thank?
  4. Describe a time you were ungrateful
  5. Does acknowledging gratitude imply indebtedness?
  6. How do you respond to someone who rebuffs your gratitude?
  7. What am I grateful for?
  8. Who or what deserves more gratitude in our culture?
  9. Is there such a thing as gratuitous gratitude?
  10. The first rule of gratitude is…

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Kindness/Gratitude Writing and Publishing Workshop in Astoria

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , , , , , , , ,

(Season’s greetings readers. I will take a break from the blog until the New Year. Thanks for reading and making contributions to support the effort.)

Writers:

At one of our recent workshops, I proposed the idea of producing a small print publication with a specific non-fiction theme. The idea was warmly received and we tentatively settled on kindness/gratitude after some stellar writing and sharing on the topic.

I want to propose a kindness/gratitude writing/publishing workshop Saturday, Feb 3 from 10-2 in Astoria. At the workshop, I wold run us through a series of prompts/readings/discussion topics and a process for making editorial decisions about the publication (e.g. naming it, size, color, etc).

Basically, it would work like this: participants would write their pieces (approximately 200-300 words in length), email them to me, I would edit, email it back for a final revision, and then the pieces are returned to me. Then I (or someone else with better skills) will design the publication (probably a two-page, front/back, 11” by 14” broadsheet), have it printed, and then we all distribute a thousand copies in our various communities or wherever we go. We could even hold a little event to publicize the release. I envision the publication coming out in the spring.

The cost of the workshop/publishing venture is $80 and that includes the printing cost for the publication. We need about 10 paying people to make this project fly and have enough voices in the publication to provide the desired variety of perspectives. If you cannot attend the workshop but still want to participate in the project, I can email the prompts and work with you that way. The writing has been so wonderful and unique this past year and deserves a larger audience. Let me know if you want to join and of course, if you want to recruit a writer friend to join us in this endeavor, by all means invite. Email me through the blog or at my email address and let me know if you want to join this project.