On Writing the Mystical with Nina St. Pierre

Boilerplate advice often warns new writers against writing about their dreams or drug-states. My hunch is that it’s because those experiences, just as moments of religious or spiritual ecstasy, are altered states—moments set apart from everyday life. Portals between waking and dreaming; moments where the sacred and mundane collide. These states can be hard to capture without leaning on cliché. Which is precisely why we must try.  This six-week workshop will focus on turning portals into prose. 

Mystical experiences don’t have to be religious, or even spiritual. They can be sensory, sensual, emotional, ecstatic. Maybe you went mad with grief. Traversed a psychic underworld or dark night of the soul. Maybe you lost and found yourself at a rave. Or experienced ecstasy in the body of another. The mystical emerges in any topic—it’s the experience, the state, that defines it. By mining innermost experiences of characters or ourselves, we will develop and contribute…