Scott Cairns, Spiritual Writing Workshop
Scott Cairns is Professor of English at University of Missouri and on the poetry faculty of the Seattle Pacific University low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review,
The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Spiritus, The Christian Century, etc.,
and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. Of his eleven published books,
the most recent poetry collection is Slow Pilgrim:The Collected Poems, which appeared in 2015; his spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, will be reprinted in 2016.
His book-length essay, The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, appeared in 2009. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and The Denise Levertov Award in 2014.
Workshop Description
Our Spiritual Writing Workshop will be a combination of pilgrimage, meditation, and conversation, all of which will yield—I trust—essays, a memoir, or poetry examining our present moment in our beloved and Spirit-haunted Greece. I’ll ask that you have a close and dialogical engagement with certain excerpts from existing pilgrimage texts, then use them as springboards into your own “sweet questioning,” as it were. During our second week together, we’ll workshop our works-in-progress. We will visit a women’s monastery near our Thasos home, several churches and pagan ruins in the area, and make a day trip to the site of the ancient city of Philippi and to the nearby baptismal font of Saint Lydia (baptized “with her household” by the Apostle Paul in the 1st Century).