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Workshops & Retreats

Pit Pinegar has led workshops and writing retreats for adults frequently during the last 10 years. Whether it is a week-long workshop or retreat on Martha’s Vineyard, a weekend workshop or retreat, or an on-going or short-term writing group, Pinegar strives to create a safe and open environment in which participants are able to develop their writing voices and/or creativity.

Except for a few on-going groups and retreats, Pinegar conducts workshops and retreats by request and special arrangement. Organizations, groups, and individuals who wish to organize or sponsor a workshop or retreat, in the U.S. or abroad, should begin to make arrangements one to two years in advance of the time they would like to go; six months to a year for weekend workshops and retreats. Pinegar will travel to your site or make site arrangements.
 

Special Interest Workshops

Writing to Heal

Pit Pinegar did a month-long pilot of her Writing to Heal workshop at Amethyst, an holistic learning center, in Skiathos, Greece, in 1993. She worked with resident clients and counselors. Since then, she has worked with groups, the members of which share a healing goal (cancer or recovery from addiction, for instance) and groups with a mix of physical and emotional healing goals. In Writing to Heal, writing well is neither a prerequisite nor a goal; writing well is irrelevant. The idea is to take painful, debilitating feelings and experiences out of the body, get them onto a page in a series of timed writings, then to share the words in a safe, clearly delineated process of compassionate witnessing.

A Creative Life/no matter what!

“I’m too busy to be creative.” “I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” “My sister’s the creative one.” “I’m analytical, not creative.”

Those are just a few of the ways in which people dismiss or minimize their creativity. One doesn’t have to be a writer or a painter or a filmmaker to be creative, one merely has to get up in the morning. Pit Pinegar didn’t consider her own creativity, apart from writing, until she had a severely hyperactive child who stood (firmly and aggressively) between her and her typewriter, between her and the blank page, between her a moment of quiet in which to think.

“It was a matter of reframing my ideas about creativity or giving up that which felt central to my life. No, I wasn’t writing every day any more, but I certainly was creative about keeping myself sane, our family of five functioning, and most of all I was creative in my approach to the whirlwind that was our youngest child. For instance, when she could vault the sides of her playpen at 13 months, I moved my typewriter and myself into it. That’s where I wrote what poems I wrote during the few months before she figured out how to get back in.

"We use our creativity every day, whether or not we give ourselves credit for being creative. When we are conscious of our capacity to be creative, confident of our ability to call on our creativity, no matter what the circumstance, we have a personal resource without parallel. When there is a wide and steady gap between where you are and where you want to be, between who or what you are, or who or what you’d like to be, your creativity probably hasn’t been put to work."

Pit Pinegar works with individuals, groups, and organizations to develop creativity as a life skill applicable to personal and/or professional concerns.