You’re a Genius All the Time

You’re a Genius All the Time

Poetry, Memories, and Short-short Stories from Your Inner Truth

Instructor: Jim Merrill – MFA, Writing & Poetics

5 one-hour sessions, 4:00 – 5:00pm

December 15, 2020
December 22, 2020
December 29, 2020
January 5, 2021
January 12, 2021

Tap into your creative mind and enhance your writing skills with this virtual course. Jim Merrill offers participants a broad menu of creative writing exercises to identify their reason to write, promote emotional literacy, and discover a writing niche that sparks personal creativity.  Participants learn tools to start writing fluidly in a variety of styles. Between discussion, peer critique, and the course materials, participants move toward using writing as a meditative method to convey personal experiences to others and build the confidence to begin independent projects.

"The prompts I came up with in this book are directed at the person who stopped writing because they didn't feel they were good enough." - Jim Merrill, interview with Keizertimes

About our Instructor


Jim Merrill is a former high school and university-level writing instructor with an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa Institute of Boulder, Colorado. He hails from the San Francisco East Bay community of Lafayette and his cultural influences lean heavily on the Berkeley free-speech, anti-war movement. He taught literacy in Los Angeles for the Labor Immigrant Assistance Program and at University of Colorado. He retired from Chemawa Indian School in 2014 and currently teaches Self-Expressive Writing 1 & 2 using his own writing guide “You’re a Genius All the Time” at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. He has published two volumes of poetry, “Blues Fall Down Like Rain” and “The Lust of Experience.”

Eric A Howald, “You’re a genius all the time: Keizer author wants you to start writing like it,” Keizertimes, July 31 2020, accessed November 18 2020, https://www.keizertimes.com/posts/1799/youre-a-genius-all-the-time-keizer-author-wants-you-to-start-writing-like-it

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