Writing for Empowerment

Weekly assignments

Each weekly assignment introduces new ways to think about writing and new tools for developing ideas. Writing techniques overlap, and meditation is  encouraged throughout the course. 

• Listing my Assets to Celebrate Myself: First, writers are introduced to different techniques for meditation to warm them up for reflection and writing. Then, using a listing technique to describe themselves, participants create a poem or prose piece that celebrates their uniqueness.
  
  

• Finding Inspiration fron Poetry: Writers use a modeling technique to write a poem describing their personal roots. They also write their own poems or reflective pieces inspired by poetry.
  
  

• Change, Growth, Migration – Images and Writing: Responding to paintings about people, such as pieces from Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration Series, participants describe their personal physical, psychological, emotional and/or spiritual journeys. If desired, they can express themselves through drawings.
  
  

• Mind-mapping the Future: In this session, participants use a pictorial “mind-map” to brainstorm ideas about the future they would like for themselves. Then they write a “letter to their future self” based on the mind map.
  
  

• Describing/becoming a Mentor: Writers first describe a mentor who has influenced them, using a visualization technique to help them generate details. Then, focusing on themselves, they describe how they can be a mentor to others.

• Reflection and Persuasion in Letter-Writing: Revisiting ideas about reflection and letters introduced  earlier, participants write to describe positive attributes about themselves to future employers, landlords, and family members with whom they have reunited.