The Unknown: Spirit, Chaos & Creative Writing + Food, Drinks & a FREE Book!

## [You're welcome to book your space directly via our website, here: https://www.writeandpint.com/events/the-unknown-spirit-chaos-and-creative-writing-food-drink-handouts-a-pub-quiz]

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## Hello there!

So, what do we mean when we say spirit?

Is there meaning in the universe, or only stories we like to tell ourselves?

Does God exist, or not, and what happens when certainty collapses?

What do we do with chaos, doubt, nihilism, mystery, and the things we can't know for certain?

This Write & Pint workshop invites you into The Unknown: the vast, unsettled territory where existential questions, spiritual longing, disbelief, myth, and imagination meet. Not to resolve these questions, but to live inside them, to test language against the ineffable, and create.

Together, we’ll be touching on themes like:

• Meaning, being, and time
• God (or not), belief, disbelief, and doubt
• Spirit (across traditions: Abrahamic, Buddhist, Taoist, mystical, and esoteric)
• Chaos, nihilism, and creative destruction
• Mystical atheism and radical unknowing
• Conspiracy, esoterica, spaghetti monsters, little green men, and the stories we invent to survive/make sense 👽

This is, of course, a creative writing day, designed to help you generate new fiction and/or poetry through guided prompts and shared enquiry.

## What we’ll read

Across the day, we’ll draw from a wide range of writers, poets, mystics, philosophers, and mythic traditions. These will be short excerpts, fragments, and quotations used as sparks for writing, not as material to analyse in depth. So, there will be plenty of time to write. The readings exist only to open doors.

Texts may include brief passages or quoted lines from:

### Fiction, Philosophy & Cultural Thought

• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Sergey Nechaev (via The Master of Petersburg)
• Albert Camus
• J. M. Coetzee
• Jacques Derrida
• Simone Weil
• Clarice Lispector
• Anne Carson
• Louise Glück

### Mystical & Non-Western Traditions

• Rabia al-Adawiyya
• Hafiz
• Rumi
• Kabir
• Mirabai
• Ryokan
• Han Shan
• Chögyam Trungpa
• Selections from the Tao Te Ching

### Folklore & Myth

• Amos Tutuola
• Birago Diop

These voices allow us to move beyond certainty, beyond Western rationalism, beyond fixed belief, and into paradox, absence, longing, humour, terror, devotion, doubt, and not-knowing.

## What we’ll write

You’ll be guided through a series of creative writing exercises and prompts designed to help you write fiction and/or poetry around The Unknown, whatever that means to you.

There is no pressure to share, though you’ll be warmly invited to if you wish.

As always, our intention is to gather likeminded, creative, enquiring, compassionate people, writers, readers, thinkers, believers, atheists, doubters, and question-askers alike.

## Schedule

11:00am
Arrive, order your tea or coffee, settle in, meet some friendly faces.

11:00–11:30am
Introductory writing exercises to familiarise ourselves with words, images, feelings, and intuitions around The Unknown.

11:30am–1:00pm
Short readings and quotations paired with creative writing prompts.

1:00pm
Lunch break: a Finch’s pub brunch.

2:00–4:00pm
More writing, more prompts, more exploration. You’ll leave with new material to take home, edit, and keep.

4:00–5:00pm 🎉 The Write & Pint Pub Quiz
A fun, light-hearted general knowledge quiz covering culture, films, literature, history, and society, a playful way to end the day together.

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If you have any question at all, about this full day workshop or any of our other events, you're very welcome to text or WhatsApp me on +44 (0) 7534 981 636.

Cheers!

Sean (A Write & a Pint).