Arkansas Writer's Event - March 2020

March 15, 2020 - Register early for this Workshop on Writing About Religion


What makes this workshop special? Writing about religion presents a unique set of challenges. Whether you’re writing about your own faith or someone else’s, it takes a high level of both objectivity and self-awareness to succeed. The goal of the three-hour workshop is for participants to have the start of a writing project.

Workshop participants will go over some of the thornier aspects of communicating about a religion, religious people, or even sacred objects and houses of worship. We will read from exemplary writing such as Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece Sacred and Profane. In this article, Gladwell examines how misunderstanding of religious beliefs can lead to failed communication, illustrated by the tragic result of negotiation between FBI agents and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. We will also read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Upon This Rock, the essay in GQ in which he narrates his visit to the CrossOver Festival, a three-day Christian music festival, dispassionately describing the festival scene and only revealing close to the end of the article what his personal relationship to the Christian faith is.



The workshop is appropriate for writers from all genres and all experience levels. Participants needn’t ascribe to any particular faith. It will run from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday, March 15 at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, 515 Spring Street, Eureka Springs, Arkansas. The class fee is $75 per person. Workshop attendees may reserve a writing suite for a residency at the Colony at the subsidized rate of $75 per night. We have limited the number of participants in order to do the topic justice, so please register soon at https://www.writerscolony.org/event-details/writing-about-religion-workshop-1.

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Ruth Nasrullah

www.ruthnasrullah.com