Classes & Workshops

Writing is a way of giving attention to ourselves and our world. The inner life can appear on the page in many forms, but at heart it is the quest for truth and truthfulness; the spiralling down deeper and deeper into the subtleties of your experience so that the experience itself may surprise you with unimagined revelations and insights.

We start with those images that have lived on in your mind and imagination for decades, and have helped to shape who you are. These images are what I encourage people to recover in my classes, as part of the difficult and exhilarating process of bringing one’s interior life out onto the page.

You Will Learn How To:

• Deepen your relationship to yourself and others by coming closer to the truth of your own experience
• Discover and be more aware of your authentic voice
• Heal and reframe difficult moments in your life
• Become clearer on your life’s purpose and direction
• Align yourself with your soul’s journey

Participants bring two or three pages to class each week for peer and teacher review, and we also practice short writing exercises in class that aim to bring us closer to the truth of our experience.

The emphasis is primarily on authenticity of voice. Students will shape and structure their experience and offer it to others – not for criticism but for a caring, non-judgmental response. In turn you will hear and receive how it is heard by others – an extremely enlivening and enriching experience in itself.

Who Should Take This Class:

Pay with a credit card or your paypal account.

(*No refunds on fee but credit may be applied to future course work and teaching)

It is in your life’s deep current that true meaning and purpose can be found. Your life purpose is not a task you have to fulfill, nor some external goal you have to attain, but rather a gift that you find already exists in yourself; a current of aliveness whose expression is unique to you. Using poetry for our prompts, we will use writing exercises to orient ourselves towards our deeper values and aspirations — those that place us as an active participant in the great web of belonging while at the same time celebrating the uniqueness of our authentic being.

You Will Learn To:

• Become clearer on your life’s purpose and direction

• Discover and be more aware of your authentic voice

• Deepen your relationship to yourself and others by coming closer to the truth of your own experience

Who Should Attend This Workshop:

Non-writers: people interested in using writing to deepen their relationship to self and others.

Writers: occasional writers who want to go deeper into their experience, and practiced writers wanting to use their craft to explore their inner journey.

Fee: $120

(*No refunds on fee but credit may be applied to future course work and teaching)

Pay with a credit card or your paypal account.

It is in your life’s deep current that true meaning and purpose can be found. Your life purpose is not a task you have to fulfill, nor some external goal you have to attain, but rather a gift that you find already exists in yourself; a current of aliveness whose expression is unique to you. Using poetry for our prompts, we will use writing exercises to orient ourselves towards our deeper values and aspirations — those that place us as an active participant in the great web of belonging while at the same time celebrating the uniqueness of our authentic being.

You Will Learn To:

• Become clearer on your life’s purpose and direction

• Discover and be more aware of your authentic voice

• Deepen your relationship to yourself and others by coming closer to the truth of your own experience

Who Should Attend This Workshop:

Non-writers: people interested in using writing to deepen their relationship to self and others.

Writers: occasional writers who want to go deeper into their experience, and practiced writers wanting to use their craft to explore their inner journey.

Individual Sessions

I also coach writers privately on a variety of projects, either in person in Larkspur or via Skype. Contact me for details, info@rogerhousden.com

Feedback from Roger’s Students

Roger is an inspired and inspiring guide in helping others uncover their personal voice and inner narrative.   He is like a fine instrument—sensitive, eloquent, and enriching—as he teaches others to learn to listen to the story waiting to be told behind what has happened to them.  Through unearthing what is personally true, one touches into what is true for all of us.  In the process of learning to attune to and articulate that inner current, one is transformed. It has been a gift to participate in this unique alchemy with him.

~ Sandra Maitri - Author of The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram:  Nine Faces of the Soul and The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues:  Finding the Way Home.

Roger does something very interesting that I have never found in another prose or poetry workshop. He doesn’t just help you articulate better what you want to say, he actually helps you articulate those narrative watershed moments that you didn’t even know needed to be said. Some works of mine were not just opaque but literally hidden, even from me. That kind of writerly, editorial insight is just invaluable. I find my work has deepened as a result, and has been taken to an entirely new level.

~ Lisa Robertson is a poet and essayist. Her writing has received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train, was nominated for a Best of the Web award, and most recently has been published by Babble, the Apple Valley Review, and the Cancer Poetry Anthology. Prior to reading for Memoir, she was the former editor of the Tonopah Review, a journal of Great Basin poetry and prose.

I’m a beginning writer who has worked with Roger for some six months now. When I think of him as a person and as a writing teacher, which I think are one and the same, really, two words come to mind: truth and beauty. Roger has a way of guiding and supporting each student to find their voice and to allow that voice to speak the truth. And because he sees beauty in truth, his feedback, even when he is offering it about something that didn’t work, is imbued with an appreciation for the beauty of expression and of the written word. So I find Roger to be at once both encouraging and supportive and kind, and also incisive and sharp in his ability to get right to the heart of the matter.

~ Roseanne Annoni Teacher of the Diamond Approach

I truly feel fortunate to have attended Roger’s writing classes.  He is a superb teacher who offers feedback that is clear, perceptive, and deeply wise. He is highly skilled at group facilitation, providing a rich environment for participants to be supportive of one another, and to respond to each other’s writing honestly and authentically. Roger models compassion, depth, presence,and authenticity – all qualities that make him a gem of a teacher.

~ Susanne West - Professor of Psychology at John F. Kennedy University and author of Soul Care for Caregivers: How to Help Yourself While Helping Others.