Benjamin Shalva is a poet, hospice chaplain, and rabbi whose work has appeared in Image, Spirituality & Health, The Washington Post, and numerous literary journals. His books include House of Mourning (Kelsay Books), a collection of poems, as well as two works of nonfiction: Spiritual Cross-Training and Ambition Addiction (Grand Harbor Press). His teaching brings together craft and depth - the rigorous attention of a poet's eye with the wisdom of one who has sat with those facing death and loss. Benjamin is available to lead workshops on poetry, loss and grief, creative writing, and mindfulness meditation, and to speak to communities, organizations, and institutions across the country and around the globe.
Workshops
The Language of Loss: A Poetry, Grief and Healing Workshop
Grief resists ordinary language. It arrives in fragments, in silence, in the body - and it asks something of us that everyday speech cannot deliver. Poetry can.
In this workshop, participants utilize poetry as a portal into their own experience of mourning and memory. Through close readings, reflective conversation, writing exercises, and guided meditation, they discover that the very act of finding words for loss is itself a form of healing. No prior writing experience is required - only the willingness to show up and write honestly.
Language of Loss is available as a single session, a multi-week series, or a retreat-day program, and can be tailored for writing centers, hospitals, hospices, bereavement organizations, community centers, and retreat centers.
Into the Unknown: The Mindful Writer's Journey
We sit down to write. And something happens. Not always. Not on demand. But sometimes - when we are quiet enough, open enough, patient enough - something rises up from beneath the ordinary mind and surprises us. An image we didn't know we carried. A truth we didn't know we held. A poem we didn't know was waiting.
This is the path many great writers have traveled. Keats called it negative capability - the willingness to remain in uncertainty without irritably reaching after fact and reason. Rilke called it learning to love the questions. The Zen tradition calls it beginner's mind. Flannery O'Connor, Annie Dillard, and others have written candidly about the experience of sitting down not knowing, and discovering that not-knowing is precisely the portal.
In this workshop, we explore what becomes possible when we make space - mindfully - for the muse. Through close readings of poets and writers who have navigated this territory, through a sampling of mindfulness practices drawn from contemplative traditions, through guided poetry prompts, participants learn to cultivate the receptivity and attention needed, as writers, to encounter the unknown.
This workshop is for writers at every level who sense that something deeper is available to them on the page and who are ready to go looking.
Rooted: Finding the Poem in Our Own Backyard
The greatest poets know a secret: the ordinary world is sacred. Not metaphorically. Not occasionally. Always.
In this workshop, we explore the work of poets for whom place - a snowy hillside, a country road, a patch of winter moss - is not merely backdrop but the very source of the poem. Drawing on the work of Jane Kenyon, Ted Kooser, James Wright, and other contemporary poets of place, we discover how the patient, humble observation of our own particular corner of the world - its light, its weather, its small and overlooked details - can become an inexhaustible well of poetic inspiration.
Through close readings, discussion, and guided poetry prompts, participants learn to bring the poet's eye to their own place - wherever that may be - and to find there what the great poets have always found: that the sacred has never been anywhere but here.
Get in touch
Whether you're looking to bring a workshop to your organization, book a reading or speaking engagement, or simply learn more about any of the offerings above, Benjamin would love to hear from you.