The Memphis Writers Ensemble (MeWE) presents the Deep Dive Series
“Creative Process: Where the Method Meets the Dream”
What is your creative process? Dr. Valentine and Dr. Ann share our crafts, rituals, and entry points to the narrative trance we call writing.
Join us for tools, talks, and embodied exploration to discover your inner path of creation. Snacks are included!
All writers are welcome (and we are ALL writers).
To register, please contact Valentine at valentinephilos@gmail.com, or just show up as you are! Entry is ticketed along a $30–70 sliding scale.
About the Instructors:
Dr. Valentine Leonard taught philosophy and women's studies at the University of Memphis for ten years, before realizing she’d rather create than theorize about it. She founded MeWE: the Memphis Writers Ensemble in 2006, a colorful and ever-evolving community of untamed Southern writers. She has been offering weekly creative writing workshops and international yoga and writing retreats ever since.
Valentine is the author of two books: Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual (SUNY Press, 2008), a philosophical essay on the role of memory, creativity, and the unconscious in 20th-century French thought; and Even the Breath (Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 2017), a gritty novel with a yogic bent. She dedicated the last five years to co-owning and running Delta Groove Yoga studio and training programs. Currently, she is writing a genre-bending memoir about her recent breast cancer journey.
Dr. Ann Walton Sieber spent the first half of her writing life as an indie magazine editor in Houston, with beats ranging from theater to LGBT culture, quinceañeras to architecture, to life on the streets.
Ann recently earned her doctorate in liberal studies from the University of Memphis with her creative nonfiction memoir-in process "This Seeming Chaos" — part history diving bell, part conversation with the dead — tracing the long shadow of her grandfather Elmer and the storms, literal and otherwise, that shaped her family across five generations. Her family memoir is a search for home in diverse realms: the archives of memory; a university cello studio; the WWI battlefields of France; the St. Louis World’s Fair; a precious house in Houston full of books and light; even on a remote Arizona Apache reservation.