Cultivating Creative Capacity

Announcing Cohort 12 and our partnership with Kelly Wilde Miller

Hey Writers!

We’re excited to announce our partnership with Kelly Wilde Miller for our upcoming cohort in October called Cohort 12: Cultivating Creative Capacity

Earlier this year, Kelly wrote V1 of a book called Creative Dysregulation: Why Your Creativity Is Chaotic & What To Do About It. And she wrote it in just five days! Since then, she has supported two dozen first-time authors in making major headway in their book projects by replacing perfection with regulated action. Her work addresses a challenge many writers face: 

Creative dysregulation is the inner imbalances that disrupt an individual’s ability to consistently engage with and execute their creative work. These disruptions hinder the fluidity, productivity, and fulfillment of the creative process, as well as one’s ability to see themselves as a successful creator.

Our approach to writing at Foster is very aligned with Kelly’s point of view on creativity. When you join a Foster cohort, we send an onboarding survey and the first question we ask is, “What’s your capacity for writing this month?”

This allows you to stop for a moment and feel into where your capacity is at the moment and opt into more or less of the cohort experience accordingly. Some people are at a place where they have the time and energy to dive in fully, while others might have a lot more going on in their lives and limited bandwidth. Regardless, there is always a way to be involved and continue your writing practice in community. We’ve found that writers can still have an impactful month of practice by simply attending the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, while knowing they’re connected to like-spirited writers.

By joining the cohort, you’ll learn how to: 

• Maintain your writing practice through challenges, turning obstacles into opportunities for growth

• Expand your capacity to be with creative tension so you may surf the waves of emotion, thoughts and inspirations that arise in the writing process

• Expand your ‘creative window of tolerance to hold more complexity and intensity through a gradual, cyclic process 

During the cohort, Kelly will be facilitating two workshops:

1. Developing Creative Regulation — Learn to recognize and dissolve creative blocks as they arise, turning moments of struggle into opportunities for breakthrough and expanded creative capacity.

2. Embracing the Iterative Cycle — Master the 'Ship, Quit & Learn' philosophy that supported Kelly's rapid book-writing process. Discover how to reach your writing goals with a gradual, experimental, and feedback-centric approach that feels good.

She will also be hosting a weekly group coaching session where you can go deeper into your creative process with her as your guide and thought partner.

Cultivating Creative Capacity starts on Tuesday, October 1st.

The cohort will also introduce you to Foster’s ecology of practices for writers and include experiential workshops and containers, such as:

• Meditation and mindful writing

• Somatic experiencing and writing

• Peer writing coaching

• Peer review & revision

• Relational writing

• Professional editing

• Finding the others

Together, these modalities will help you write from a more embodied, emotionally-rich place, navigate to your truths that are worth sharing, and move beyond the forms of resistance that may arise so you can publish courageously and find the others.

Throughout the Cohort, you’ll be exploring a thread, the blanket term we use at Foster for a creative question, complexity, or muse. And you’ll pull on that thread using the modalities above.

By the end of the one-month journey, you’ll be able to practice this ecology on your own, as you write towards truer and truer expression of creativity and self. 

We hope you’ll join us.

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Cohort FAQs:

What is a cohort, exactly?

A simple but powerful month-long communal practice that helps you deepen into your writing practice and produce a piece of writing that stretches you both as a writer and as a human. Participants explore a thread—a question, complexity, or muse—that’s alive for them, write from that place, and express something meaningful.

During each week of the four-week cohort, you will pull on your thread using Foster’s ecology of practices:

• Being with our threads: meditation and mindful writing

• Feeling into our threads: somatic experiencing and writing

• Writing into our threads: writing craft and relational writing

• Revising and expressing our threads: peer review, professional editing, and finding the others

You’ll also have the ability to opt into peer support, group coaching, and professional editing via the Foster Chrome extension, all of which you can access according to your capacity and desire.

The minimum requirement for completing a cohort is to join the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, which are each 90 minutes long, and to express something to someone by the end of the cohort.

Who are cohorts for?

• Writers who want to go deeper into the inner work aspects of their creative practice

• People who are familiar with these developmental modalities and want guidance directing them to their writing and creative practice

• Writers and people who want to partake in a next-gen community of practice that’s co-owned, co-operated, and collectively intelligent to its core

How much does it cost?

Cohort 12: Cultivating Creative Capacity costs $999.