Threshold Writing: A One-Day Workshop on Setting Sacred Space and Intention with MK Chavez and Maw Shein Win

Workshop Description:

Rituals in writing can be as varied as the fonts we prefer to write in or the specific times and places we choose to write.

This workshop’s three-hour journey is designed to explore the powers of ritual in our writing practices. We will prospect our personal writing for known and unknown rituals, habits, and routines and move on to study their impacts on our creative outputs.

Taking place in February, a threshold time where we stand between what has been and what’s yet to come, this session invites us to use the quiet clarity of midwinter to renew our relationship with intention. It's an ideal time to listen inward, create new patterns, and kindle fresh creative energy.

Participants will be offered complex generative writing exercises to create first drafts of writing with depth and insight. We will create a sacred space for writing and enhance our ability to channel creative energy and focus through writing experiments and readings. Whether you want to understand your writing habits better or create new rituals to aid your writing process, this workshop welcomes you. Participants will leave with new writing and new writing practices.

This workshop is appropriate for all creative writing genres and writers of all levels

MK Chavez is a writer and educator whose body of work explores mixed-race identity, social justice, ecological resilience, and horror cinema. Chavez is the executive director of Bay Area Poetry, poetry stage curator of the Bay Area Book Festival, and poetry editor at The Fabulist. Chavez has received the PEN Josephine Miles Award, the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award, and the 2026/27 Berkeley Civic Arts Award, among others. Their published poetry collections include Dear Animal, Mothermorphosis, and the book-length lyric essay A Brief History of the Selfie.

Maw Shein Win’s most recent poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn), which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, the recipient of the 2026 AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award. A Space for Air in the Eightness (Omnidawn), a collection of poetry and essays, is forthcoming in 2027. mawsheinwin.com