Passing the word — SFWAR is calling for submissions for their 13th annual Artists Against Rape! Please share this info, and share your work/story/art: we need your voice! xox! Jen
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Call for Submissions
Monthly Archives: August 2010
Call for submissions to 13th annual Artists Against Rape!
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this buoyancy: workshops, holding space, and the netting we create for one another
the description of this image says its spilled coffee, but look at the tea bag tag hanging off the side -- let's say it could very well be tea.
a lovely way to wait for the tea water to boil: wandering around the kitchen, grabbing allspice berries, clove buds, breaking off bits of Mexican cinnamon stick, cracking open cardamom pods and coriander, all to put into the tea ball for spiced green tea. Now it’s simmering next to me and smells like goodness, smells like cool mornings, smells like something clean and differentiating and sharp.
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Tagged AWA, books, cooking, declaring our erotic, gratitude, write whole
Seeking office assistant/ promo help — will trade for workshops!
Writing Ourselves 
Whole needs assistants! Are you one of ’em?
Do you love the writing ourselves whole workshops but are unable to afford participating right now? Do you have online-promotions, flyering, and/or office assistant skills? Would you be interested in trading those skills for writing workshop time? If so, please email me and let’s talk!
I’m expanding the number of workshops I’m offering, and find that, finally, yes, I need some help with the admin side of things! You’d be welcome to work with me in the writing ourselves whole office space, if you have a laptop (and can help me figure out how to set up internet access in the space!) — but you’d also be more than welcome to do your work from home.
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pay attention to all the different facets that truth has
I’m afraid to start writing again this morning. There’s this fragile peace within me, something inside that’s just barely standing on its own two feet, and I don’t want to shatter it or shake it up or push it back over.
I didn’t blog last Friday — I got up, overwhelmed and sad, and didn’t have any words to meet me once I sat down at the page. That happens sometimes, and often I write through it anyway. What am I doing here, I type — why aren’t I asleep, I could be in bed, what’s the point of this? Then I get tired of that sort of writing and I move into something else, something more interesting. On Friday, I couldn’t get to something more interesting. Everything fell away from what words could do for me. I hate that place. So instead I went online, I read my email, something I try never to do before doing my writing, because it’s always easier to read than to write, at least for me.
There’s a mailing list I’m on, STAT (Society for Treating Abuse Today), for survivors of extreme and ritual abuse and also for therapists who work with survivors of such abuse. Someone had posted a link to the Franklin Scandal. I followed the link, and found myself reading excerpts from a book about a man, Larry King (not the television star). Larry King ran a credit union, where kids from Boys Town worked. There was a contract between Boys Town and Franklin Credit Union. Larry King also flew kids from Boys Town to Washington DC, where the kids had to have sex with/get raped by prominent public officials, at sex “parties.” This went on in the 80s, and I don’t want to go back to the page again to get all the details — I don’t want to get sucked in again. He provided kids for the parties, and also a photographer — he wanted to get pictures of these politicians that could be used for blackmail. In this scenario, the kids were stage makeup for a higher game — political jockeying between/among adults. These kids were pawns, tools, utensils in a bigger game. Their individual humanity didn’t matter — what mattered was getting a photo of this particular individual, this career politician, this power broker, having sex with some kid. Any kid. The humanity of the kid doesn’t matter to the adults running the game.
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Tagged cooking, franklin consipracy, resilience, sexual trauma, trauma aftermath
painful, some, yes: but singing
young child frisking a soldier -- Bansky graffiti in bethlehem.
Note: this morning’s write contains some specific language around sexual violence. Just a heads-up. xox, Jen
Sit down here like you’re sitting in front of a page.
shaking off as much sand as we can before we get in
The alarm goes off and I wake up with the feeling like I’m on the edge of the world, like I’m in a void, like nothing’s happened or about to happen, just my heart is pounding.
It takes a little bit of being up before I can remember my dreams, some big performance I’m supposed to be mc-ing, with or at the CSC, it’s supposed to be like one we’ve done there before but now Robert wants it to be different, only now I can’t remember exactly how. The first one had had a couple hundred attendees, and now we have maybe 20 or so. It was only 18 minutes past when the show was about to start — more people were probably on their way. I was trying to get us all to move outside from this big room we were in, so that the show could start — earlier in the dream, I think it was earlier, I was taking an exam, an english test, like reading comprehension, only I started the test late because I was looking for something, like I didn’t have the right exam booklet or something else. I was cocky about the test, I didn’t really think I needed that much time for it because it would be so easy for me, but then I ran out of time and was going to have to start making educated guesses. it was a multiple choice exam, and I was trying to remember the rules about educated guessing, like you have to do on the SAT sometimes.
This whole year has seemed like fall, like we moved from winter-rainy season (finally, in May, we moved out of it), into this thick warmish early fall, where the chill’s always just around the corner. Does it seem that way to you? We’re starting to cook fall things — I’m ready for apple dishes, soup.
I (eventually) remember that I’m human
Today I am thinking about how to move forward. I get up, less nauseous, make my coffee, come into the quiet office, light a candle, write in my notebook for awhile. The pen moving across the page makes different things happen than fingers moving against keyboard. my candle’s still lit. How do I move forward. One small step: one thing, every day, that reminds me I’m human, while I move amid all this inhuman infrastructure. Water the plants, listen to music made with fingers and breath instead of keystrokes. Rinse the mung beans just sprouting in their small plastic jar. Take one more step. Cover up the bags under my eyes and move out into the world. Let some of the dark seep through, because it’s thorough: not for pity, but because I am honest. Right?
What does it mean to be a human? During these intense-triggered times, I sometimes forget: I remember, instead, what it feels like to be outside the human experience, that disconnected, untethered. I talk with my sister and she tells me about energy, about connections among people, about that most unexplainable magic. When I talk with my sister I (eventually) remember that I’m human. I remember I have a heartbeat and blood. I remember what saved me.
I’ve been reading Andrew Vachss’ last Burke book*, Another Life. Someone asks Burke what saved him, and he says it was his family: not his blood family, of course, since he doesn’t know them, and not the ‘family’ that raised him, as that was the State, as abusive as it wants to be, but his chosen family.
Maybe the nausea comes from continuing to be hopeful
I recently heard that cognitive dissonance occurs when you act in a way that’s at odds with your values. I’ve also heard that cognitive dissonance happens when, in order to function, you have to hold in your consciousness two totally different ideas or realities at the same time. Some of us experience this kind of thing when we’re kids, if we come from abusive places, where, out in the world or at school, we were met as giving or smart or creative, and at home we were met as stupid or selfish or bad. We had to hold both of these realities of ourselves at the same time — we had to somehow understand that different people could interact with us in completely different ways, opposing ways, even if we thought we assumed it seemed as though we were the same person (weren’t we?) when we moved from one situation to the next.
That experience of cognitive dissonance doesn’t lessen as I get older — when I come to understand that someone has a completely different understanding of a situation than I do, or when I come to understand that someone I thought knew me, saw me, actually sees someone very different — and I have to wonder if I am that person that they see, as well as the person I understand myself to be (who is, in this case, the opposite of, or at least quite different from, their vision — or at least, so I’d imagined).
It’s too heady, trying to explain this, too much in my head — the bodily experience is that I’ve been nauseous for a week. I wrote somewhere else that I wished others could throw up for me: maybe if I explained clearly enough the awfulness of the situation I was in when I was a kid, my listener could get sick and throw up and then we’d both be relieved. I’m not good at that sort of release. All I can do is let the stories go. So I’m swallowing the bile and drinking lots of peppermint and/or ginger tea, which helps a little.
no wonder everything hurts right now: birth is painful
"Massive Young Stars Trigger Stellar Birth," Spitzer/Chandra telescope images
When something major is falling apart around you (or/and inside), sometimes you have to let go of the reins for a little while. At least, that’s true for me.
I’d set up a practice of writing in the blog every weekday — then, Thursday and Friday of this week, I just couldn’t do it. What I wanted to write about I don’t have words for, and if I did have the words, I wouldn’t yet be ready to share them with the world. So I took a break. I slept a little bit more. I did my Thursday workshop with the MedEd folks, worked on administrative tasks (finally got the August writing ourselves whole newsletter out), got my hair cut (again, finally), watched movies. I’m thinking I should re-read Trauma Stewardship. I’m making space to cry, to curl up into a ball. Space, too, to laugh. Yesterday afternoon I went to Bolinas and talked to the sea. That’s an important part of my self-care routine, and I just don’t do it enough. I wanted to swim, but forgot my bathing suit or a change of clothes (the last time we came to Bolinas, I had a different pair of jeans in the car, so I went ahead and got all the way in the water in my shorts and tshirt, and it was perfect) — so I just kept rolling up my jeans, and sister ocean kept on splashing me big enough that they got wet no matter how far up my legs they were. It was a good talk. I watched the little black dog-heads of sea lions peeking and poking up now and again, far from the little boys running and screaming and throwing logs to their shaggy, soaked dogs. I scoured my feet in the sand and found excellent shells.
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Tagged friendluv, gratitude, self care, transformation, trauma aftermath
we’re living the truth of our unique sister-beauty
I guess this is when we grow up — when we let our parents go.
It takes our making that release, even if they have already released us. Even if they, over and over, have opened their bodies, opened their hands and let us tumble out onto the wet earth: still, we have to unknot ourselves from their longings and fears, we have to pull the cords from around our necks, we have to fish the hooks (yes, thank you for that one) out of our shoulders, we have to move forward without them.
What I’m talking about isn’t something I want to deal with metaphorically right now, but I’m not ready not to tell it slant, so I’ll stop.
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Tagged family, sister, trauma aftermath