Creative Encounters in Awe Walking: Awe and Contemplative Writing

Join us on Saturday, May 4, from 10:00 - 11:30 a.m. for our Awe and Contemplative Writing workshop led by Charles Alexander. In this workshop, participants will explore the new Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine and learn about the intersection of awe and writing. Contemplative writing teaches us to slow down and bring intention to all communicative acts, highlighting the way we can feel, experience, and act in the world and allowing us to explore our surroundings with a newfound sense of creativity.

This workshop takes place at the new Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, located at 1502 E Mabel St, Tucson, AZ 85719. Parking is available in the adjacent lot 2147.

For more information, visit awe.arizona.edu or healthyaging.arizona.edu

Register by May 3.

About Creative Encounters in Awe Walking:

Creative Encounters in Awe Walking gives students and community members tools to encounter and share moments of awe in and across our communities. The goal is to promote awe walking as an accessible and affordable wellness practice across the lifespan. This is in response to recent neuroscience research that has associated positive health benefits with taking short walks while looking for things that inspire awe. The Creative Encounters in Awe Walking Workshop Series is run by Dr. Jennie Gubner and her Ph.D. student Sydney Streightiff and explores how creativity can be used as a tool to enhance and encourage awe-walking practices in your daily life.

These workshops are being presented in collaboration with community partners from the Tucson area, including the University of Arizona Art Museum, The Ignite Museum, the University of Arizona Arboretum, and the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine.

About Charles Alexander:

Charles Alexander is a maker. His primary area of making is poetry and essays, i.e. the art of words, but some people know him equally as a maker and publisher of books. A collection of new poems by him, Time Being, was just released in October 2023. Other books include Hopeful Buildings, arc of light / dark matter, Near or Random Acts, Certain Slants, Pushing Water and AT the Edge OF the Sea: Pushing Water II. Truro/Shift, the third volume of Pushing Water, will be out in 2024. His poetry and prose have also been issued in more than a dozen chapbooks or fine press editions. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Naropa University, the Univ. of Arizona, Pima Community College, and the Univ. of Houston-Victoria. He is a former director of the Tucson Poetry Festival, helped to found and still serves on the board of POG (a poetry and arts presenting collaborative), and was instrumental in the development of the Tucson Warehouse Arts District in the 1990s and early 2000s. He has participated in the TAMAAS Poetry Translation Project in Paris, France, the CAAP (Chinese American Association for Poetry and Poetics) conferences in China, and in US Poets in Mexico. His Selected Poems, translated by Chen Du, will be published in China. In 2021 he earned the CLMP award for lifetime achievement in literary publishing. He currently writes a column for American Book Review about poets/printers. He is married to the artist Cynthia Miller, and they live in Tucson, Arizona.