The Bag of Stars

Become a star! An invitation to February's week of online quiet writing hours.

Your invitation to join the constellation

The title, ‘The Bag of Stars’, comes from the final line of Ursula K. Le Guin's wonderful essay / book, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 'Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.'

The format for The Bag of Stars is simple: we meet online at 7am, take a couple of minutes to greet and settle, when I share a poem, a prose excerpt or sometimes a visual. These can sometimes act as a portal, an entryway, to a piece of writing for participants and there has been more than one delightful incident of synchronicity and serendipity in the group over the past year and a half as a result. Though I mainly view them as something to warm up the creative room, who knows what forces come into play when we come together with generous and playful intentions.

We then mute our devices and we each turn our focus, our playful attention, to our own personal writing project, our own ‘bag of stars’ for the hour. At 7.55 everyone comes back together, one or two may share a little about what they achieved during the hour if they wish, and the session will close at 8am. We each go on into our day feeling more centred, more grounded. We have created, we are creators. We now know this bag is indeed capacious and generous. We have experienced it.

As one participant wrote in an email after the September sessions: 'I still don't fully understand the alchemy of it all, but it is a space where I get stuff done!'

I host this space from the beautiful Suir valley in south-east Ireland. Join me and others from around Ireland, from as far east as Munich and as far west as Oregon, as we move towards increasing light here in the northern hemisphere and perhaps through our writing, act to redress forces of darkness that appear on the horizon. To join simply message me…

As Donna Harraway writes in her incisive introduction to the Terra Ignota edition of Le Guin’s book that I keep close by on my desk…

It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with… That’s how worlding gets on with itself in dragon time. A brave student of dragons, Le Guin’s stories are capacious bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living. ‘A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.’ p. 10.

Dates: *Monday, 17th through Thursday, 20th February 2025. *Note that it is four mornings this month instead of our usual five.

Time: 7am to 8am GMT, on Zoom. I would love to meet you there

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