I attended my first Meadow course in 2014. As a self proclaimed non writer I was nervous about sharing. Lucky for me, Meadow then, just like Meadow now, fostered a safe space for writers (anyone with a working hand, mind, and heart) to share when and how they wanted. Sustaining a safe and vulnerable atmosphere, Meadow somehow-someway seamlessly navigates the course with every writer on board eager to explore.

Exploration is foundational to our writing with resiliency course. Searching the landscape of our minds guided by prompts carefully selected by our instructor, us writers are encouraged to confront the complexities of this difficult world and reflect on our independent or shared experiences within it.

Each week we honor each other by being a witness to each other’s work. Reflection and responses in class from varying points of views help us understand and support each other. By embracing empathy first we grow stronger in both writing and resiliency.

As someone who has benefited immensely from Meadows courses over this last decade, I highly encourage you take one of her courses. None of this is possible without her bringing writers together and orchestrating a course where writers can embrace our truest selves. I look forward to another decade of writing with Meadow.

~ Brian

Meadow has mastery in holding a safe space for vulnerability. Her workshop is an incubator for creativity, healing, and greater trust and communication with each of our own inner guides.  I saw immediate benefits for myself after one session. I do not consider myself a writer, yet sharing my writing with others, and hearing what they appreciate and think is strong in my writing is building my confidence that insights, beauty and magic are waiting just below the surface to come through my hands in the form of words.

~ Lianna

Meadow produces a space that allows me to find myself.  Meadow’s facilitation with intentional and well thought out prompts gently guide us all, helping us through a journey of self-discovery and giving us the honor to bear witness to others’ in an intimate, but safe, way.   She puts her heart into her work, and that is precisely what has given me the opportunity to find mine.
 
~ Christina
Laboring over inscriptions does not have to be painfully alienating. Laboring over inscriptions can be deliciously satisfying. Through Meadow’s writing facilitation magic in various workshops over the years, including Writing for Resilience, Writing with Video, and more, I learned how to write, creatively and playfully, with others. Through the supportive and generous spaces she held, I encountered moments when words flow to feed as opposed to starve. Through the surprising and unorthodox prompts she posed, I tasted the pleasure of assembling sentences to make a charming dessert. Wanna have a taste?

~ Ann

Meadow is a startling, insightful, and talented writer. This translates directly to the workshops she facilitates. Working with her, I’ve experienced topics and prompts that have taken me to new levels in my own writing. Her comments on participants’ work elevates the entire group. Her training and experience in therapeutic work contribute to the depth of her teaching. I’d encourage any writer, experienced or not, to sample Meadow’s instruction. It can be life-changing.

~ Cope

I have also taken creative writing classes at least eleven times; only one was really ever helpful. Participating in several iterations of writing seminars hosted and facilitated by Meadow on the other hand have always been helpful.

Meadow brings an incredibly attentive ear to the writings of her group participants. Her modeling of that listening typically becomes infectious among the writers. And so the groups she has facilitated, framed through a particular approach to every piece of writing as autonomous and complete unto itself, really opens up spaces to explore, grow, and see reflected one’s own writing. It’s very productive.

Although the craft of writing itself inevitably receives some emphasis through the prompts and the group feedback, the more profound encounter as a writer is in writing something to be read aloud to an immediate audience, something most writers have no access to or only the sounding board of (oft-put upon) family members and friends. This is a really great space to write and explore writing.

This is not a space for beta-reading. Each piece arises out of a prompt and generally never existed before Meadow says, “Go, see you in N minutes.” This makes the writing an exercise in the physical workout sense of the word; it builds strength and the habit for writing.

But it is also a space for exploring one’s immediacy, whether simply the day at hand, or the manifestation of an ancient grief or trauma. In “Writing for Resiliency,” in particular, the very invitation and act of putting onto the page that which troubles one, and then reading it to others who bear witness to it, already potentially has a healing quality. There’s the even more radical possibility that one’s trauma or grief will be recognized in another–and suddenly, what seemed strictly personal is disclosed in a public, systemic sense. In this way, it becomes genuinely possible to become aware of the roots of systemic trauma, shared across a diaspora of others, and to thus lay a groundwork for beginning to undo those traumas (of sexism, racism, homophobia, genderism, classism, ableism, and so on), not just in ourselves,, but in the sources where they first arise.

~ Yeen