The Creativity Workshop

Using the Tools of Creative Writing, Memoir, Art, Photography, Storytelling and Mindfulness


The Creativity Workshop In Verona March 15 – 19, 2020

The Creativity Workshop In Verona

March 15 – 19, 2020

The Creativity Workshop in Verona will help you become more creative in your personal and professional life. We use many techniques in creative writing memoir, art, photography, storytelling, mapmaking, mindfulness and guided visualization to help you explore your inner creativity.

VeronaVerona Campanille in the background

What Will You Learn?

The Creativity Workshop is an experiential course of doing and experimenting. Our exercises and instructors’ talks focus on helping you learn practical techniques to stimulate your imagination and innovative thinking.

  • Explore the process of creativity, rather than simply focusing on the product.
  • Discover how to find inspiration in the world around you.
  • Get over creative blocks and the fear of failure.
  • Work with many different mediums to develop your creativity in your chosen field.
  • Use your memories to trigger your imagination.
  • Engage your curiosity every day and make it work for you.
  • Establish a 15 minute a day creativity practice to accomplish your goals after the Workshop ends.
VeronaVerona is a short train ride from Venice

Why Verona?

Verona is a charming town, just an hour’s train away from Venice. Beautiful Verona is an unabashedly romantic town, made famous by Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet. It has wonderful Roman ruins and a coliseum, Medieval houses, and Renaissance palazzos. There is a world-class art museum of Italian Masters, as well as 6 or 7 smaller museums and Romanesque churches.

  • Our Workshop takes place in the 5 star Due Torri Hotel in Verona’s historic center, a UNESCO heritage site. It is a walker’s paradise, full of elegant shops, delicious trattorias, countless picturesque cafes, and grand public gardens.
  • You can also make easy afternoon trips to Venice, Padua (Giotto’s frescoes), and Vicenza (Palladian architecture). A little farther afield, you will find the resort towns of Lake Garda. You can also visit the Veneto countryside with its lush farms and famed vineyards.
Verona1st Century CE Roman Amphitheatre in Piazza Bra

Daily Schedule

Some exercises are done individually while others are collaborative. Here is a day by day schedule:

Day 1:

Introduction to the hows and whys of The Creativity Workshop.

Relaxation: Relaxation techniques to help your imagination flow.

Guided Visualization: Calling forth the vocabulary of your imagination using the myth of the hero’s journey as a framework.

Automatic Drawing: Finding our hidden imagery.

Show and Tell: Retrieving and sharing childhood memories to spark new ideas. This exercise will sharpen your storytelling skills.

Instructors’ talk: How some famous writers, scientists, and artists found their inspiration, and how you can use some of their methods to find yours.

Day 2:

Relaxation.

Mapmaking: Mapmaking as a way to find, chart, and communicate your creative process and projects.

Automatic Writing: How automatic writing (also known as “free writing”) can help you create in new and surprising ways. How you can use automatic writing to outrun your inner judge, get over creative blocks, and discover new ways of developing and editing written work. How alternating between writing and drawing can help you develop creative flexibility and mental dexterity.

The Interview: Listening to and experiencing a life outside your own. How listening is as important as doing in creative work.

Writing in Cafes: an exercise that will continue to take place over the next 2 days.

Instructors’ talks may include:

  • How to do ongoing creative work in short modules of time.
  • How to use luck and coincidence to jump-start creative projects.

Day 3:

Letter Writing: Letter writing as a way to express voice, character, and audience.

Miniature Worlds: Storytelling with found objects.

Writing in Groups: How writing and/or drawing with others can stimulate your imagination and expand your point of view.

Instructors’ talks may include:

  • The importance of play in creative work.
  • Valuing creative process over product.
  • How to do ongoing creative work in short modules of time.
  • How to use luck and coincidence to jump-start creative projects.

Day 4:

The Myth of the Other: Imagining yourself living a parallel life. What would you do that you aren’t doing now?

Trips to the Past: Using a foreign environment to invoke memory and inspire transformation.

The Close-Up: Using photography and drawing to focus on details and change the way we see.

Instructors’ talks may include:

  • Following your innate creativity and listening to its intuition.
  • How to rekindle fearless imagination.
  • The Power of the Magic phrase: “What If”.

Day 5:

The Legend of the Hand.

Automatic Writing and Drawing with a new twist.

Cafe exercise: Writing, drawing, photographing about people you find in local cafes.

The Sand Mandala: A collaborative exercise in combining mediums and perspectives.

Instructors’ talks may include:

  • The Gift of the Amateur.
  • Creativity is a Muscle: Use it or Lose it.
  • Making your home and work environments inspiring.
  • How to stay creative after The Creativity Workshop ends.
Christina Clodomir
Art Therapist and Dancer, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
”I am so excited to share what I got from this workshop, to enable people to tap into unlimited creativity.”
Evan Mazunik
Student, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
“In The Creativity Workshop, I found a place to dream, to question, to understand. I strongly believe that we should fearlessly guard such spaces an...
Francine Filion
Director of Communications, Canadian Teachers’ Federation, Ottawa, Canada
“Thank you for reminding us that it’s okay to play and to allow our creativity to flourish. Shelley and Alejandro are so gentle and inspiring. I s...