Begin Today!

Sunday, January 18, 2015, The Denver Women's Press Club, 1325 Logan St. Denver, CO.

Salon Description: Author Elizabeth Van Ingen joins with poet, writer, and editor Jennifer Phelps to discuss the art of memoir writing at our January Salon. They'll address a host of questions, among them: How do you turn your personal story into a book? What form should it take? Do you write with specific themes in mind or do the themes just emerge? Should your work be a braided story or chronological? And are you revealing too much "personal stuff"?

Sunday, April 15, 2012, The Loveland Wellness Collective, 133 E. 4th St. Downtown Loveland.

Workshop description: The world renowned psychologist Carl Jung said that a dream is like an unopened letter from the unconscious. Like a message to the soul, dreams can hold lots of creative content to fuel your writing practice. In this workshop, we will work with dream themes, plotlines and images to write poetry or mythologized short stories. Each participant is encouraged to bring their writing journals and 1-2 dreams to work with. Through Jungian-focused dream-work techniques, we will discuss dreams and amplify the symbols, images and mythological themes that emerge. 

Friday, May 11, 2012, Unity Church in the Rockies, 1945 Mesa Road, Colorado Springs, CO, Sponsored by the Colorado Springs Jung Society

Lecture Description: How can poetry be viewed through a Jungian lens? Brenda Hillman, a contemporary poet, is continually in the process of creating a self on the page. This Bay Area poet’s continued striving for new and undefined ways of composition is an example of the process of individuation. Hillman enters worlds of bafflement and disbelief by juxtaposing ordinary events in her poems with the imaginative and mysterious, which interact on the page in a swerving dance.

Brenda Hillman’s interest in Gnostic beliefs and alchemy aligns her poetry with Jung’s psychology. Tracing Hillman’s poems through her successive books, one might see how her poems illustrate an alchemical process of transformation.

After a brief explanative arc of the lyric and how Hillman's poetry has evolved over time, the talk will illustrate how Jung's theory of the self enters into the alchemical process taking place on the page. We will perform our own alchemical writing experiments and at the end of the evening, one might even see how a mystical experience (spirit) transforms into a poem (matter).

* Contemporary Mysticism and Poetry: An Enactment of Poetry and Practice  (with discussion of Quo Anima: Innovation and Spirituality in Contemporary Women’s Poetry) for the "Metaphor, Making, and Mysticism" conference at Boston College, February, 2019.

* Quo Anima: Women, Spirit and Poetic Innovation panel at the AWP Conference in Chicago, March 2012. 

* Mysticpoetics: Writing the Alchemical Self for the Colorado Springs Jung Society (May 2012) and the Boulder Friends of Jung (April, 2010).

* Naropa University

* Monkey Puzzle Press release party

* In-Stereo Press

* University of Colorado Museum of Natural History

* Yellow Pine

* Studio2 Gallery in Austin, TX  

* Pomegranate Place

* Mercury Café

* 2019 Conversation with Elizabeth Robinson and Jaime Robles about Quo Anima in The Argotist Online.

* 2013 Featured guest on The Poetry Show (Fort Collins public radio station KRFC 88.9).