Cantadora (keeper of the old stories) Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote the book that has become the Bible of women: Women Who Run With The Wolves. The Soul of Poetry unravels through Estes’s work with both mythlines and Jungian analysis that powerfully intersect through the realms of Inner Territory.

Her research, writing, and living have changed our lives.

A single mother on welfare, the first in her family to graduate from both grade school and high school, Estes was born to Indigenous/Mexican lineage and was adopted by Hungarian immigrants as an older child. She worked her way through college with minimum wage jobs and an infant in tow, going on to earn prestige and reverence in her field.

In the days leading up to the thinning veil where we meet with our ancestors and our dead, we’re gathering to hear the story of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s life and to tap into the pocket of soul she weaves from. Come prepared to honor this wild elder and to write like a soul running with the wolves.

In the first half of this class, we’ll be learning about Clarissa’s life and what forged her as a writer. This gives us a clearer window into the writer’s work and the Inner Territory that has helped it shapeshift.

In the second half of class, we will work from prompts and follow some maplines left for us in Women Who Run With The Wolves. We’ll begin a practice of telling the whole truth while leaving room for the reader to breathe around our wild edges. We’ll attempt to introduce new elements into our creativity, weaving unique Inner Territory elements as we go.

This, like all of our writing classes, is not about technicality, grammar, or perfection. This class is a journey inward to a unique landscape in the Inner Territory. It is an invitation to dive deeper, to open wider, and to use your powerful voice in a way that has been courageously modeled for you.

Saturday, October 25 at 3 pm PST