Instructor: Marilyn McEntyre, PhD. Online, zoom.

Stepping outside our imbedded frames of reference, widening or narrowing the frames that delimit and define our interpretations of experience, can be an exhilarating experience. We'll do some exercises designed to help us notice frames, reframe and see what happens.

These 90-minute workshops will address a different topic each month. Each session will include a brief presentation, prompts, a bit of writing and workshopping time, and suggestions for developing a particular writing practice. Handouts offer guides for cultivating new dimensions of your writing. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails. All levels of writing experience are welcomed!

Instructor: Marilyn McEntyre, PhD. Online, zoom.

Open letters addressed to individuals or groups but published for the general public can be surprisingly effective and persuasive, being both intimate and public, local and global. We'll practice these, and think together about to whom and why we might address an open letter at this time.

These 90-minute workshops will address a different topic each month. Each session will include a brief presentation, prompts, a bit of writing and workshopping time, and suggestions for developing a particular writing practice. Handouts offer guides for cultivating new dimensions of your writing. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails. All levels of writing experience are welcomed!

Note: this is a one-time change to our usual rhythm of “First Saturdays” and it is taking place on the second Saturday in October.

Hosted by Doug Dunderdale, co-director of the film series. Join us!

An Associated Press team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol struggle to continue their work documenting atrocities of the Russian invasion. As the only international reporters who remain in the city as Russian forces close in, they capture what become some of the most defining images of the war: dying children, mass graves, the bombing of a maternity hospital, and more. The film draws on AP reporter Mstyslav Chernov’s daily news dispatches and personal footage of his own country at war. It offers a vivid, harrowing account of civilians caught in the siege, as well as a window into what it’s like to report from a conflict zone, and the impact of such journalism around the globe. 

Academy Award® Winner: 2024, Documentary Feature Film; 
BAFTA Award Winner: 2024, Best Documentary

Instructor:  Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

Description:  Whether or not you plan to publish, writing can become a valuable dimension of your daily life. Crafting sentences, paragraphs, poems, prayers or simple lists can become a way to process what's happening in public life, in family life, or in your own memory or imagination. Writing in response to passages or sentences or phrases that give you pause can be surprising: sometimes thoughts or feelings don't surface until words come. Especially now, as the church and the world face truly unprecedented challenges, writing is a quiet calling that can help us hold steady in the storm. In this two-hour workshop we'll explore and experiment with approaches to journal keeping that are varied, prayerful, life-giving, and manageable, even for busy people.

Discussion following the film viewing will be led by Sam Choi, co-director of the film series.

What is Christian Nationalism, and why should the Church care?  "God & Country: The Rise of Christian Nationalism" is a hotly debated 2024 American documentary film directed by Dan Partland and produced by Rob Reiner. The film discusses the emergence of Christian nationalism and its close relationship with far-right politics in the United States, exploring its perceived threat to democracy and the politicization of Christianity. The documentary is based on Katherine Stewart's book "The Power Worshippers" (2020).  Come and engage this critical topic to discern the implications of religious nationalism's rise in the US, and what gospel faithfulness requires of us in the face of it. 

Instructor: Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

In September, "Reading Like a Writer" examines how every good writer teaches us something about how to read and how to write. Reading slowly, reading for "how" and "why" rather than simply "what" changes the way you walk through a text.

These 90-minute workshops will address a different topic each month. Each session will include a brief presentation, prompts, a bit of writing and workshopping time, and suggestions for developing a particular writing practice. Handouts offer guides for cultivating new dimensions of your writing. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails. All levels of writing experience are welcomed!

Instructor: Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

The slightly paradoxical task of maintaining real humility while also finding ways to write with authority can raise deep questions about how we invite the Spirit to speak through us, work with us, and give us confidence, and how we understand and use our gifts. In this session we'll look at how writing in an environment of pervasive commodification and not a little pretension poses a vigorous challenge to the values we hope to maintain as human beings who are hoping to make our writing humane.

Each online workshop in this series will address a particular topic in writing, especially for those interested in personal essays and/or responses to public life. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails.

Registration Fee: General $25/ Reduced $10/ Student Free

Location: online zoom

with Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

Even if you don't address your "Dear Reader" directly, you forge a social contract with your reader as soon as you embark on a story. In this session we'll consider the relational dimension of writing--how we "keep it real," stay close to the reality that we are inviting other human beings, one by one, into the intimate spaces of mind and heart we create for them, seeking to be hospitable as well as challenging, opening a conversation that may continue after they finish the last page.

Each online workshop in this series will address a particular topic in writing, especially for those interested in personal essays and/or responses to public life. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails.

Location: Online zoom

Fee: General $25/ Reduced $10/ Student Free

With Marilyn McEntyre, PhD
Archetypes are powerful. They are patterns--familiar character types, situations, structures--we work with as we find ways to tell unique stories. In this session we'll explore a number of archetypes to see how they shape the expectations and values we bring to our stories, and how they inform and enliven our inventions.

Each online workshop in this series will address a particular topic in writing, especially for those interested in personal essays and/or responses to public life. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails.

Registration: General $25/ Reduced $10/ Student Free

Location: Online/Zoom

Instructor: Chris Corwin, PhD

Psalm 31 is masterful work of poetic art, weaving together a complex of concerns, beliefs, and misgivings, of the psalmist. The 31st Psalm is replete with quick shifts, competing thoughts and emotions, conflicts, along with tensions between an interior sense of failure and outside hostilities. Paying attention to such rich texture elevates its potency as a psalm of spirituality and guidance, and makes it particularly relevant to our present situation as a nation and world.  Dr. Christopher Corwin will lead us through Psalm 31 through an interactive lecture and discussion.

Location:  First Presbyterian Church Bekeley

Cost: $35, $15 or free (for students)

With Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

Sometimes a prompt provides just the little nudge we need to get started, or to pick up and keep going. Some prompts are better than others. In this session we'll experiment with prompts--try them out, make them up, consider ways they can help trick us into writing just when we think we've reached a dead end.

Each online workshop in this series will address a particular topic in writing, especially for those interested in personal essays and/or responses to public life. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails.

Registration: General $25/ Reduced $10/ Student Free

Location: Online/Zoom

Instructor: Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

This workshop (the last of a six-part series) will be an opportunity to reinvigorate our own language habits and to equip each other with words that will help us navigate the confusions and challenges of this historical moment.

“Our times are in God’s hands.” And also in ours—the rich, wild internet, the water crisis, widespread warfare, climate change, a polarized economy—these are the conditions in which we are to work out our salvation together. We need to learn new ways to speak peace. We need to find words that comfort and sustain courage in the face of large and looming threats.

Registration Fee: General $25/ Reduced $10/ Student Free

Location: Online/zoom

Instructor: Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

This workshop (the fifth of a six-part series) will be an opportunity to reinvigorate our own language habits and to equip each other with words that will help us navigate the confusions and challenges of this historical moment.

“Our times are in God’s hands.” And also in ours—the rich, wild internet, the water crisis, widespread warfare, climate change, a polarized economy—these are the conditions in which we are to work out our salvation together. We need to learn new ways to speak peace. We need to find words that comfort and sustain courage in the face of large and looming threats.

Registration Fee: General $25/ Reduced $10/ Student Free

Location: Online/zoom

Instructor: Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

This workshop (the third of a six-part series) will be an opportunity to reinvigorate our own language habits and to equip each other with words that will help us navigate the confusions and challenges of this historical moment.

“Our times are in God’s hands.” And also in ours—the rich, wild internet, the water crisis, widespread warfare, climate change, a polarized economy—these are the conditions in which we are to work out our salvation together. We need to learn new ways to speak peace. We need to find words that comfort and sustain courage in the face of large and looming threats.

Registration Fee: General $25/ Reduced $10/ Student Free

Location: Online/zoom

Instructor: Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

Description: This workshop (the first of a six-part series) will be an opportunity to reinvigorate our own language habits and to equip each other with words that will help us navigate the confusions and challenges of this historical moment.

“Our times are in God’s hands.” And also in ours—the rich, wild internet, the water crisis, widespread warfare, climate change, a polarized economy—these are the conditions in which we are to work out our salvation together. We need to learn new ways to speak peace. We need to find words that comfort and sustain courage in the face of large and looming threats.

General Tuition $25 / “Living Lightly” Tuition $10 / Student Tuition $0

Instructor: Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

Description: This workshop (the first of a six-part series) will be an opportunity to reinvigorate our own language habits and to equip each other with words that will help us navigate the confusions and challenges of this historical moment.

General tuition $25 / “Living Lightly Tuition” $10 / Student Tuition $0

Location: Online/zoom

With Marilyn McEntyre, PhD

Whether you're writing fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, your narrator is not your self. You find an angle of vision, a persona, a mood, perhaps a dimension of your own character, and develop that presence as you write. Sometimes your narrator will surprise you. She may be a little edgier, quirkier, blunter, more authoritative, or more ambiguous that you are. In this session we'll talk about discovering our narrator, learning to let him/her/them speak in ways that might stretch us, and experimenting with the distance between yourself and your speaker.

Each online workshop in this series will address a particular topic in writing, especially for those interested in personal essays and/or responses to public life. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails.

Registration:: General $25/ Reduced $10/ Students Free

Location: Online/Zoom

“Where a Sentence Can Take You: The Art of Letting Paragraphs Happen”

With Marilyn McEntyre, PhD / Online, Zoom

Working with a variety of prompts of a sentence or less, we’ll experiment with approaches to development that can keep writing playful, surprising, rich, and provocative. Come join us!

Free Admission. Suggested Donation..

with Marilyn McEntyre, PhD / Online, Zoom

Each online workshop will address a particular topic in writing, especially for those interested in personal essays and/or responses to public life. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails.

$25/workshop. Student rate also available

with Marilyn McEntyre, PhD / Online, Zoom

Each online workshop will address a particular topic in writing, especially for those interested in personal essays and/or responses to public life. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails.

$25 per workshop. Student rate also available.

with Marilyn McEntyre, PhD / Online, Zoom

Good reading is never passive. These days, in the midst of political disarray and ecclesial divisions we need good readers more than ever who bring skill, discernment and prayerful reflection to reading both the Bible and works of literature, history, science, and the daily news. In this session we’ll talk about reading practices that help keep us responsible and responsive as well as identifying some of the pitfalls and consequences of careless reading. We’ll also reflect on what it still means to be “people of the book."

General fee $25 / Student fee $10

With Marilyn McEntyre, PhD / Online, Zoom
Each online workshop will address a particular topic in writing, especially for those interested in personal essays and/or responses to public life. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails.

$25 per workshop. Student rate also available.

Instructor: Marilyn McEntyre, PhD * / Online, Zoom

We’ll be reflecting on what poetry has to do with maintaining a commitment to truth telling and how the practice of poetry—reading it and writing it—can attune us to language in important and invigorating ways. There will be time to try out some exercises in making poetry and in “creative reading” in this interactive evening.

General fee $25 / Student fee $10

Instructor: Dr Marilyn McEntyre

Each online workshop will address a particular topic in writing, especially for those interested in personal essays and/or responses to public life. We will talk about language, faith, form, and what a lively, committed writing life entails.

$25 per workshop. Student rate also available.

The importance of the language we use with ourselves and others. At this gathering we’ll be reflecting together on the importance of the language we use with ourselves and others to articulate faith, spirituality, values, and moral commitments. We’ll talk about “loaded language,” “trigger words,” and what lively conversation, both within circles of trust and across lines of division, might look like. Time will be reserved for conversation about the conversation!