During the Mindful Day of Writing Conference on June 27, multiple writing invitations were offered. One of the key invitations was the Life Map, where students are invited to explore particular territories of their lives and consider them as potential topics. Richard Koch wrote about this in The Mindful Writing Workshop and modeled it during the afternoon session. There are some well-known variations:
Georgia Heard's Heart Mapping: TED Talk and book
Linda Rief's Positive-Negative Graph: Read-Write-Think adaptation
In his book, Teaching Adolescent Writers, Kelly Gallagher discusses "writing territories"--areas about which we and our students have passion and expertise.
Our colleagues from the CREATE Lab, Jess and Jordan, led us in a memory mapping exercise, where we drew overhead maps of our current workspaces and our former classrooms. Here is a book that contains detailed descriptions of memory mapping invitations, Getting the Knack: 20 Poetry Writing Exercises (1992) by Stephen Dunning and William Stafford: Getting the Knack PDF
Linda Christensen, who will be visiting on July 21, has an article," Mapping Childhood: How Our Stories Build Community," about memory mapping, drawn from the 2nd edition of Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/mapping-childhood/
In the bonus session, Imagining Other: A Strategy for Writing and Healing, Laura offered three invitations, building on expressive writing, directly at our problems and concerns: 1) dream writing; 2) multi-layered timelines to unpack, and 3) writing to imagine other possibilities.
Link to recorded video:
She also pointed to this recent anthology of student work, which also includes multiple writing invitations:
Link to Healing Through Creativity anthology and discussion guide, featuring award-winning student work: https://www.artandwriting.org/scholarships/scholarships-special-achievement-awards/new-york-life-award/healing-through-creativity/