Monthly Archives: August 2012

Good morning gorgeousness. Good morning quiet apartment, red candle, green and white and mint tea. Good morning sacred writing space. Good morning transformation.

What’s slowly stretching awake in you today? What in you needs a little extra love and sweet morning voice? Let’s say good morning to that part, too.

I feel both slow and explosive this morning, almost like when I have caffeinated coffee and the outside of me looks calm and orderly and steb-by-step, and the inside of me is a raucous freight train of energy, blowing out in all directions, kinetic and hyper. At those moments, the Watcher part is always a-wonder at how such energy could be contained, how I could possibly move so steadily from task to task when, inside, the Tasmanian Devil is dervishing.

But we do that all the time, don’t we? We behave like a particular self, an orderly self, in order to function in the world — we know our inside selves aren’t appropriate for polite society. Continue reading →

We’re getting the fall workshop schedule together here, and I wanted to keep you informed as to what’s coming up!

– Writing the Flood (our general-topic writing playtime!) meets every third Saturday of the month in Oakland;
– Write Whole: Survivors Write (a writing group for women survivors of sexual trauma) begins its fall session on October 1; and
– the fourth quarter of Dive Deep (our advanced manuscript/project-focused group) begins October 7.

At Writing Ourselves Whole, we actively work to engage the stories that can be the hardest to tell or write, and create spaces intended to allow for risky writing and powerful support. All stories and experience levels are welcome! Read on for more info about these writing opportunities, and lease let me know if you have any questions or would like to register — I’d love to write with you!

Can’t attend any of these workshops but want to stay in the loop about what’s coming in 2013? You can join our mailing list here: http://bit.ly/PGmmlj

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I had the pleasure of performing–along with other Body Heat luminaries Kathleen Delaney, Alex Cafarelli and Gigi Frost (with our amazing Lady Ms Vagina Jenkins backstage, being Organizer Extraordinaire)– last week at FemmeSPEAK, the spoken word event at FemmeCon 2012 in Baltimore. Each of us got four minutes to connect with a raucous, fierce and gorgeous crowd. Here’s what I read (a bit sexually explicit, just as a heads-up):

We deserve pleasure. This is what we have been healing for.

This is my love letter to a young hungry survivor femme (and by young, of course, I mean all of us: still learning to open, to lean, to reach, to feed ourselves).

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Just a quick note to acknowledge the reformatting around these parts — wanted to make the workshop information easier to find, and open up the formatting a bit. I’d love your thoughts on our new look!

xox and so many thanks for your words today.

Good morning good morning! Outside, the morning is just starting to uncurl itself around the city, and I’ve been up for about an hour, working on morning pages and now moving into this space. What’s beginning to unfurl in your body in this early part of your Friday?

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There’s a lot I want to write about here — I’m feeling grateful to be drawn back into these “pages,” this blog space. This morning there are a couple of things: more about what’s nonnegotiable and, too, what it means to write like a girl. Maybe I’ll start with the first, and move to the latter in a second post.

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Good morning good morning — I’m here in my small writing room, with the stars casting their little light through the just-turned-open blinds in the living room behind me. All the spaces are quiet today, except my shoulders and lower back, which are singing songs of aches and waking and would like to stretch some more. Are there songs rising from places in your skin today?

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Quick update: August’s Writing the Flood meets this weekend, Saturday, August 11. Next month we’ll be back to our regular, third-Saturday-of-the-month schedule.

Also, don’t forget about the master class I’m teaching at the end of this month: Embodied Words: Writing Your Body’s Narratives, offered through Memoir Journal’s Workshop series. Saturday, August 25, 9am-5pm, at ArtJam in Berkeley. Visit http://www.memoirjournal.net/events/master-class-embodied-words-writing-your-bodys-narratives/ for more information or to register!

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In a letter I received this month (have I written here about this letter-writing that I’ve reengaged in this year? A little bit — but we have to talk more about that), a friend talks about determining what her nonnegotiables are — in relationships, in friendships, in work — and about learning from and using the past, in an intentional way, to allow herself to craft a now-life that truly works for the deep her in this present, that will carry her into her brilliant next, her whole genius, her full blossoming possibility.

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