Highlights: Seminar for Motherhood and Writing Guest Teachers

Join Us for An Online Seminar for Motherhood and Writing: Saturday, January 27, 2024 from 1-7:15 p.m. CT
Learn more about the seminar here.

Session Leaders and Topics
Session One: Catherine Ricketts on Ambition, Writing, and Motherhood
Session Two: Tanya Davis on Why the Daily Mundane Matters
Session Three: Jamie Quatro on Writing, Calling, and Letting Go of Guilt
Session Four: Marlena Graves on Spiritual Formation for Moms and Caregivers Who Write
Session Five: Charlotte Donlon on Spiritual Direction for Caregivers Who Write
Session Six: Charlotte Donlon on Lament, Loss, and Creativity

Anyone who registers will have access to all session recordings for full two weeks beginning at 8 a.m. on Sunday, January 28, 2024.

Please Note

All are welcome. Every person from every stage of the writing life and any point of the faith/doubt/mystery spectrum is invited to join us for this online seminar. Spiritual Direction for Writers® has a reputation as a safe place for all to come as they are.

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Highlights: Seminar for Motherhood and Writing Guest Teachers

More about Tanya Davis

Books:
Urban Monks and Mystics: Find Inner Peace without Joining a Monastery, 2019
May I Please Speak With My Father, 2005

Non-Profit Work:
William and Mary Davis Foundation: The William and Mary Davis Foundation seeks to provide support to nonprofit organizations whose missions align with the vision of The William and Mary Davis Foundation. By providing numerous outreach and exploration opportunities, they encourage participants to find purpose and live well. Through retreats, board service, and partnerships, they hope to change lives as they support and encourage individuals. The William and Mary Foundation gives to organizations such as: Daystar University, Fox Valley Christian Action, Orange Hands, By The Hand, Haymarket Center, World Fistula Foundation, and Metropolitan Family Services.

Purpose By Design: Purpose By Design believes that God designs every girl with unique gifts and a special purpose. Through retreats, events, and mentoring, they provide young girls with the support they need to help them to actualize their full potential.

Bio: Tanya Davis is a wife, mother, grandmother, philanthropist, and author whose life’s

work is giving and pouring into the lives of others. 

 

Twenty years ago, Tanya, her husband Stephen and their seven children established the

William & Mary Davis Foundation with the mission of providing opportunities to those

who reside in under-resourced communities and advocating for those whose voices are

not heard. They also support organizations that align with their mission. The foundation

provides financial support, and educational experiences for individuals for the purpose

of empowerment-financially, emotionally, spiritually.

The foundation supports organizations that embody this mission including Daystar

University (Nairobi, Kenya), Fox Valley Christian Action, Young Life Teen Mothers,

Orange Hands, Women at Risk International, and By the Hands, Haymarket Center, MFS,

GEMS of St. Sabina, East Tennessee Freedom Schools, Chicago Foundation for Women,

DuSable Museum, and many others.

 

Tanya’s desire to enrich the lives of others also led her to launch Purpose by Design, a

mentoring retreat for girls in under-resourced communities, in 2010.  Each year, Tanya

and a group of volunteers host 10-20 girls for a long weekend of enrichment workshops

– from health and wellness to college prep and goal planning. Recently, the organization

formed a partnership with Foolproof to provide financial literacy empowerment for

young women.

Tanya has authored three books, May I Please Speak with My Father, I Don’t Want to

Shame My Daddy’s Name, and Urban Monks and Mystics (co-author). She also has

served as publisher for numerous other books on a variety of topics, and guest

contributor for online organizations.

 

Tanya holds a bachelor’s degree in counseling from DePaul University with an emphasis

on Narrative and a master’s degree in Narrative Medicine from Lenoir-Rhyne University.

She believes in the power of story and being an active listener in another person’s story

is how we will grow in our empathy and love for each other. She has facilitated narrative

workshops that bring people together to share their stories.


Bio: Marlena received her M.Div. from Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, New York and his pursuing her PhD in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH where she is researching the influence American culture has on Evangelicals’ view of immigration, race, and poverty.

Are Evangelical views and behavior really ensconced in biblical teaching or are Evangelicals, white Evangelicals in particular, more influenced by cultural forces of which they are unaware? Marlena has been on the pastoral staff at several churches, worked at non-profits, been on the residence life staff at a university, and worked for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) – for and with migrant farmworkers in the Midwest and South and the minority community in Toledo, OH.

She continues to labor alongside others for justice, for human rights. Since 2015, she has been an adjunct professor at Winebrenner Seminary in the areas of discipleship and spiritual formation. She has written for a wide variety of venues like Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics Blog (now CT Women), Womenleaders.com, and Our Daily Bread where she was a bylined regularly contributing writer. And also for places like, Think Christian, Faith Street, Relevant, and publications by (in) courage and the Zondervan Women’s Study Bible.

Marlena is a former member and board member of the Redbud Writers Guild. Currently she is a board member of Evangelicals 4 Justice, works in partnership with Freedom Road, and also belongs to INK: A Creative Collective. As a Puerto-Rican influenced by many streams of the faith, she feels as if she dwells on the borderlands of Evangelicalism.Make it stand out


More about Jamie Quatro

Books:
Fire Sermon, Grove, 2018
I Want to Show You More, Grove, 2014

A Selection of Stories, Interviews & Podcast Appearances:
Two Men, Mary,” The Paris Review, 2023
Jamie Quatro on the Dual Lens of Memory,” The New Yorker, 2023, (an interview about her short story “Yogurt Days” (which you can listen to here)
Tesser Well (Madeleine L’Engle Podcast), 2020
About Parenting, Faith, and Intoxication: Leslie Jamison and Jamie Quatro in Conversation,” LitHub, 2018

Bio: Jamie Quatro’s novel Fire Sermon (Grove Press) published in 2018. Selected as one of the Top Seven Novels of 2018 by The Economist, and named a Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement, Fire Sermon was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book, Indie Next pick, and New York Times Editors' Choice.

Quatro's story collection, I Want To Show You More (Grove), was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was chosen as a favorite book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker. The collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, the Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

A contributing editor at Oxford American, her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Recent essays have appeared at The New Yorker, Oxford American, and as part of the Greenpeace Climate Visionaries series. Quatro is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. She lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Learn more at jamiequatro.com.


More about Cat Ricketts

Books:
The Mother Artist, Broadleaf Books, 2024
Saving Words: 20 Redemptive Words Worth Rescuing (contributor), Cascade Books, 2021

A Selection of Essays & Podcast Appearances:
Weaning: Intimacy and Independence in Alice Neel’s Mother Pictures,” The Kenyon Review Online, 2021
My Brother Beside Me,” Image Journal, 2020
What I Saw When I Really Looked: My Late Brother, Heroin, and Grief,” The Millions, 2018
Not My Story Podcast, 2021
Context Matters Podcast, 2021

Bio: Catherine Ricketts is an essayist, songwriter, and professor. Her nonfiction on the arts, grief, joy, and spirituality appears in the Kenyon Review Online, the Ploughshares blog, The Christian Century, Image, The Millions, Paste, and NPR-affiliate The Key. She studied writing at the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MFA in nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University. Her first book, a work of literary nonfiction on motherhood and artistic practice, is forthcoming from Broadleaf Books in 2024. She teaches at Villanova University.

Find her on Instagram at @bycatherinericketts, or stay in touch via her newsletter

Catherine is available for freelance writing in arts journalism, literary criticism, and personal essay. She regularly speaks on podcasts on the subjects of grief, addiction, faith, and the arts. She teaches workshops for new and experienced writers in spiritual nonfiction, writing about the arts, writing through grief, personal essay, and memoir.

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Writerly Nourishment with Catherine Ricketts