SOUL BONE℠ LITERARY FESTIVAL
Current & Past Festivals
Know the Unknowable • Imagine the Unimaginable • Say the Unsayable
My name is Nynke Passi and I am founder and director of Soul Bone℠. I started Soul Bone℠ as a literary center years ago to offer private classes and workshops. When I founded and began directing an online MFA program in creative writing at MIU, I adopted this same name as a service mark for the literary festivals that eventually grew from the residencies. For me, these festivals were a pursuit of passion and a labor of love. We operated on a shoe-string budget. We had a tiny staff, sometimes no staff. There were many late nights and long hours, but we pulled it off.
To our surprise, over time Soul Bone℠ has grown into an international literary festival with 30 - 75 visitors present at almost every session. Because it was sponsored by an MFA program, with some support of the Soul Bone℠ Literary Center, we offered all events free as an extra bonus to the public. We had next to no marketing, but through word of mouth and our own connections in the literary world, we ended up with visitors not only from many U.S. states and Canada, but also from Ireland, England, Wales, the Netherlands, Hungary, Germany, Belgium, Ukraine, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, Australia, China, Japan, South Africa, and more. Some of our visitors were there at every session, even if it was three in the morning their time. They told us they did not want to leave; they had been wanting to find a literary community like this, only they did not know it existed.
An Irish visitor commented, "I am delighted to hear that I won’t have to wait too much longer for the next Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival. I know it probably sounds overly dramatic, but I felt a huge loss when the Fall one ended. It was amazing to have shared that time, day after day, with your writing community. I can’t wait to experience it again. It can be very hard to find places where you can scratch at the depths of your soul and lived experiences in your writing and be met with an appetite to hear it. I felt I found that at Soul Bone℠. It was so encouraging when one can so easily be discouraged from writing.” Another visitor said, "Being at Soul Bone℠ felt like coming home. My week with you was my vacation."
At the heart of everything we do at Soul Bone℠ is the safe, nonjudgmental space required for creative exploration and experimentation. Poets and writers imagine the unimaginable, know the unknowable, say the unsayable. They are the voice of the future, pointing to new ways of seeing and other ways of being. At Soul Bone℠, we use out-of-the-box tools to open up creativity, and we share our personal journeys into the mysterious wilderness of the imagination where poems and stories sing in the trees of our bones, where passions ignite and dreams call from subconscious depth, offering metaphors as gifts. Great writing is often a matter of getting out of our own way, beyond the ego - to leap into the unknown. How can we listen and hear? How do we trust our inner voice and intuition? How do we get back to the space where writing is joy and creativity play? In our workshops and classes, we help you journey into the wilderness of your creative imagination where writing finds its pulse.
The most special thing about our literary festivals has been our guests! We've been thrilled to welcome twenty to roughly thirty literary guests per festival and can't begin to express our gratitude to all of these amazing poets and writers we admire, who often were humbly and kindly willing to lower their fees to join us, since our budget was tiny. Not only were our guests accommodating, but all were amazingly accomplished and powerful writers whose knowledge, skill, enthusiasm, eagerness, dedication, and joy were infectious, inspiring, and transformational. Many of our literary guests were excited to come back - again and again. We paired writers who were great friends, and the resulting readings felt like sitting around our guests' kitchen tables, listening in on fantastic conversation and sharing.
“You can memorize all the bones
in the body, but which
is the soul bone?”
We had panels on a great variety of subjects such as Saying the Unsayable, Spirituality and Creativity, Identity, Creativity and Diversity, and more. Master classes ranged from use of pronouns in poetry to almost any aspect of craft in almost every genre, to publishing and pitching, translation, spirituality and writing, not to mention wonderfully whimsical or moving generative sessions on subjects such as "Looking for Poems in the Weird Places," "Writing Family," "Writing Our Grief," "Writing through Trauma," "Writing Joy," and "Writing toward Healing," or an innovative series of sessions on sound and poetry called "River Writing and Earth Song" with musician and sound therapist Kenny Kolter.
At our very first festival, poet Rafael J. González said, “Lorca said that the poet always yearns for silence. There is holy silence—the silence before mountains, waterfalls, the beloved. Then there is unholy silence, when we keep silent in face of injustice.” We have not forgotten Rafael González’ words. Naming the unnamable and saying the unsayable is truthtelling, healing, transformational, and gives lifeblood to our writing and our world.
All Soul Bone℠ offerings reference Lorca’s duende, the unspeakable energies that arise from the soles of our feet and run through our spines, that make us feel physically as if the tops of our heads were taken off when we read or write (Dickinson), that connect body and spirit and senses, that have the mortality but also the strength of bones, that spark the mystical and give life to our writing, yet that also speak out against injustice and include death and shadow.
SOUL BONE℠ LITERARY CENTER OFFERINGS
Illustrations on this page: Jitske Wadman
