Writing the Flood
Open the gates and let your writing voice flow
A half-day, open-topic writing workshop!
Monthly Archives: December 2010
Writing the Flood is this Saturday!
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Tagged announcements, writing the flood
we know what in us needs to burn
(click on the image to visit the NYTimes' review of a book about the Bread and Roses Strike)
So hard to get up and get going when it’s dark outside at 7am! This one needs to be quick — I’ve got to get in the shower and head to the day job.
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Tagged beauty, bread and roses, prompts, radical self care!, workshop write
the most audacious thing of all
Last night, my friend said, Whatever you want, you deserve it.
Do you ever sink into that belief, even just sometimes? And then let yourself want big? Like, quietly, when no one’s looking, do you think, I really want to live in Paris for a year: and then let yourself experience the possibility for a moment, fully, before the naysaying editor voices jump in and stomp all over it?
This morning, in my notebook writing, I made a list of the things I want — and, as I read through it, felt: why not?
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unrescued & saving ourselves over and over again
(Just a little explicit language of sexual abuse in here: so you know it. Be easy with you. xox, Jen)
It would seem I’m having some trouble getting back into my regular blogging routine, after the road-trip break. If I were a smart blogger, I would have brought my camera with me on the trip, so that I could create posts out of photos — but with no iphone and a lightly-packed (at least for me) self, there was no camera.
I’m in a nostalgic mode — about a month ago, my ex-wife sent me a box that she’d salvaged from the storage shed we filled when we moved out to CA in 03. On Sunday, I spent the morning in my newly-designated creative space in the little back cottage behind our house, going through cards and letters and papers from up to 20 years ago. Among all the college papers and postcards from friends on their semesters away in foreign countries were: transcripts from the trial (after my mother’s husband was arrested for sexual abuse and incest); letters from my mom, both before and after the trial (and how different they are); handwritten letters from two very close friends when they were away in the Army (xox, you two); a couple old photographs; even a letter from my sister from before the ‘break.’ (How to find the language to talk about the experience of befores and afters — I often just use those words themselves, capitalized and fairy-taled: the land of Before and the land of After: doesn’t the terrain change that much? Of course, it’s not a hard and fast boundary between those two places, and going through some of the papers I’d saved, I found an email I’d sent to my sister during the DMZ time, after we’d broken contact, after I’d confronted my mom about what her husband had done, and she was still living with him. I forget about that part, about that terrain — a lot, I forget about that terrain.)
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Tagged friendluv, gratitude, nostalgia, prompts, trauma aftermath
maybe I’ll do something with it when I get up
Good morning! Whew, it’s been a minute since I’ve been here during my morning writing time — for the past several years, when the dark comes in Nov-Dec, I get very quiet and hibernate-y; all I want to do is be warm and comfortable and quiet. Slowly, the Mr. and I are creating warm spaces in a house that hasn’t been kept warm for a long time, it seems. Lots of baking sweet potatoes helps warm a house. Quiet, thrummy music. Candles help, too. And space heaters, thermal curtains. Rugs, too, once they come our way.
The other thing that happens during this time is that I’m less pulled to put words out — there are moments when I get tired of words. Does this happen to you? Words are among my favorite and least favorite things, and there are times when I am overwhelmed by their limitations, how very much language can’t do. Sometimes I need to put it down, rest both of us, me and words, forgive us for what we can’t communicate exactly right, or at all.
If I had more time this morning, I’d share more with you about this, which is kind of paradoxical, I guess. The Fall Writing Ourselves Whole workshops have finished — Write Whole ended before I went away to New Mexico, and Declaring Our Erotic ended just last week; both groups made up of strong writers who were ready and willing to go deep. I continue to be grateful. At some point, I’ll be able to write about how bits of each writer’s work (I mean, each of the several hundred folks I’ve written with over the last many years) will linger with me, become part of the literature of this life: what an extraordinary gift.
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Tagged declaring our erotic, MedEd Writers, prompts, workshop write, write whole
(redux) How do the workshops impact survivors of sexual trauma?
(I’m away from the computer for about a week, so I’m sharing some posts I wrote a couple of years ago after my interview with Britt Bravo and the Arts and Healing network, about the writing workshops and writing as a transformative process. – xox! Jen)
6. What has been the impact of the workshops for survivors of sexual abuse?
I love this question, and it’s a challenge for me to answer: while I can say what’s been my experience, I can talk about what I think happens for some folks sometimes, but I can’t speak for all the survivors I’ve written with. So I’m going to say some things I think about the workshops can impact or have impacted folks who’ve participated (myself included), but I’d love to hear your thoughts, too!
(Note: there’s a little bit of sexual language in this post — just fyi!)
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