The Creativity Workshop in Florence

Thursday, July 26:

• Relaxation.
• Guided Visualization: Map-making as a way to find, chart, and communicate your creative process and projects.
• Automatic Writing: How automatic writing (also known as “free writing”) can help you create in new and surprising ways. How you can use automatic writing to outrun your inner judge, get over creative blocks and discover new ways of developing and editing written work. How alternating between writing and drawing can help you develop creative flexibility and mind dexterity.
• The Interview: Listening to and experiencing a life outside your own. How listening is as important as doing in creative work.

Friday, July 27:

• Guided visualization: Letter writing as a way to express voice, character and audience.
• Miniature Theatre: Storytelling with found objects.
• Automatic Writing: Writing in Groups. How writing and/or drawing with others can stimulate your imagination and expand your point of view.


• Instructors' talks may include:
• The importance of play in creative work
• Valuing creative process over product
• How to do on-going creative work in short modules of time
• How to use luck and coincidence to jump start creative projects

Saturday, July 28:

• Guided Visualization: The Myth of the Other. Imagining yourself living a parallel life. What would you do that you aren't doing now?
• Trips to the Past: Using a foreign environment to invoke memory and inspire transformation.
• The Close-Up: Using photography and drawing to focus on details and change the way we see.
• Instructors' talks may include:
• Following your innate creativity and listening to its intuition
• How to rekindle fearless imagination
• The Power of the Magic phrase: “What If”

Sunday, July 29:

• Guided Visualization: The Legend of the Hand.
• Automatic Drawing and Writing continues with a new twist.
• Cafe exercise: Writing, drawing, photographing people you find in local cafes.
• The Illuminated Manuscript: A collaborative exercise in combining mediums and perspectives.
• Instructors' talk may include:
• The Gift of the Amateur
• Creativity is a Muscle: Use it or Lose it
• Making your home and work environments inspiring
• How to stay creative after The Creativity Workshop ends

NOTE: There are no classes on the final day of the workshop. This day is free for participants to put to active use the various techniques learned in the workshop by exploring the cultural, historical and natural riches of each location and its people.

Excursions are not included or arranged.

Monday, July 30: Free day - Suggested visit:

• Trip to Tuscan hill towns, including San Gimignano and Cortona.
• Trip to Siena or Fiesole.

Tuesday, July 31: Departure