Category Archives: Uncategorized

Here’s my impression of a car salesman: sign up now and save!

Posted on May 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

A quick note about our summer in-person workshops: you may already know that there is a $50 discount for registering by the early bird deadline (June 10 for Write Whole: Survivors Write and June 11 for Reclaiming Our Erotic Story). That means you pay $300 instead of $350 for an 8 week workshop. (That $300, by the way — if you like math like this — breaks down to less than 40 dollars per meeting, and about 15 an hour). All you have to do to qualify for this discounted rate is to register and send your deposit by the deadline.

I’m adding an additional incentive to those who know they’d like to participate in one of our survivor-centered writing group this summer — a further %10 discount on that early bird rate for those who pay in full by the early bird deadline. That means $270 for the 8-week writing group.

My aim here is to get the get the groups fully registered earlier rather than later, so that I can focus more attention on preparation and less on promotion!

Please let me know if you have questions or would like to register. I look forward to writing with you!

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged ,

the past is never not with us

Posted on May 14, 2013 | 2 Comments

This morning I wake up at the seaside. Although my Oakland block looks the same as it always does — early traffic rushing toward the 880, neighbors being walked by small dogs, trees leafed out bright green against the brick and concrete apartment buildings — the sky is clouded like a Parish painting and the air smells like the shore. It seems as though I could wander with the pup just another block or two and we’d be there in front of the biggest mother of all, pounded by surf and sunrise. Did San Francisco fall into the sea overnight? Did Oakland finally pull up a chair at the table of the Pacific?

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

This Saturday, it’s time to gather again for Writing the Flood — we only have a few spaces left. This is our monthly, half-day writing group, a space to write in a room full of other fun, creative folks. Bring ideas for a new project, or the voices of those characters who’ve been rattling around in your head for a month — or just bring a notebook and let the prompts take you somewhere surprising. Join us!

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

Are you still in the aftermath of mother’s day? I don’t know anyone who finds the second Sunday in May to be a day of pure celebration — well, that’s not true. But I know many more people for whom the day has some tinges (tinges?) of sorrow in it: for mothers gone, disconnected, passed away; for difficult relationships; for mothers who were neglectful or abusive; for mothers unknown or unknowable; for the mothers who never should have been mothers (and for ourselves, grateful to be alive nonetheless)–

I meet the day with trepidation because I think I will never have an unfraught relationship with my mother. I love her, we spoke on Sunday, and the conversation was good. She shows up. She asks how I’m doing. She wants to be of use. She tells me about her life with the family back there. So why would I feel verklempt when I hang up the phone? Isn’t this what I wanted? The chance to talk with her about what was going on in our lives now, without always having to fall back into talk of the past? But, of course, the fact is, the past is never not there with us, in any conversation we’ll ever have.

Last night, at Write Whole, I offered a prompt that consisted of quotes about mothers and mothering, and I ended up writing about my mother and I locked forever in the embrace of apology and accusation:

I lay claim to my mother’s story as if it were mine to tell — I have no home, no place to return to, but I put my popsicle-sticky hands on my mother’s story like I deserve to do so. I open her like a pantry, like a kitchen cabinet, i hang all her laundry out to dry. This is my compensation, in return for the years I spent being her husband’s amuse bouche. I cannot say who was the main course. This is a thin ice skating over the deep ocean of our sorrow. When we are in the same room, all she is ever saying is I’m Sorry; all I am ever saying is, Why did you let me go — why did you let me go? Sometimes I think other people can’t see that we are still that forty year-old woman with her arms wrapped tight around a wailing, en-stiffened twelve year-old girl. Sometimes even we forget that we are clutched that way, and have for so long that we do not know how to be anything else to one another.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

If mother’s day brings joy for you, take ten or so minutes today and write into that joy. If mother’s day brings sorrow or anger or disappointment or, more likely, some combination of all of the above (joy or celebration or honoring included!), give yourself some time to write into those feelings. Follow your writing wherever it seems to want to go.

Thank you for naming and recognizing the mothering that you desire and deserve. Thank you for the words you find for all of it.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged

we are our own rescuers

Posted on May 13, 2013 | 1 Comment

Good Monday morning — here’s the grey fog, the greet of cloud to hills, the way the city sounds are obscured and muffled by the weight of the shallow wetness. Here I am in how much I want to be alive today. Where are you on this Monday?

~~ ~~ ~~

What does it mean to get rescued? This was the weekend of mother stories, and I’ll write more about those tomorrow — today what I have is the shallow ache of missing: I miss my mother, I miss what she could have been, I am angry and sad and longing, I am still a twelve year old girl waiting for her to stand up for me.

Today I am thinking about rescue.

I spent all last week not hearing anything about the women in Cincinnati. Early in the week, I caught a headline and brief story on the BBC — this was late at night, maybe last Monday after the survivors workshop. The reporter was talking about three brothers, three women who’d been held captive, and a city that was celebrating. The story shared few details — they talked to someone in Ohio, a neighbor of one of the abducted women, who said the whole city was rejoicing. “We’re just so glad that they’re alive.” I arrived at my destination, turned off the car, put the story out of my mind, and proceeded not to get any further details for the rest of the week. I managed to see nothing on social media, and to hear nothing on the radio news: maybe the media was saturated with the story last week, but I’d apparently found a way to walk between the raindrops — if I hadn’t caught that BBC story, I’d have known nothing about these women until someone mentioned it in another workshop.

I still haven’t gone looking for details. I haven’t found stories to repost on our facebook page. I don’t want more of this story.

What I want to feel is simple fury at the perpetrators and joy for the women who finally escaped. I want to be glad that people are (apparently) celebrating the women’s rescue. But I am stuck in the smaller, less sensational, unwritten story: that the kids in the house up the block from that one where the women were held captive, the kids who are being sexually abused by a parent or other relative, will go a lifetime understanding that they were not worth rescue.

I don’t get excited when I see one of these rescue stories. I get numb. I think, Oh, another one.

This is a terrible thing to think.

I think about all the women all the people  in Cincinnati (and Seattle and Sheboygan and San Francisco) being raped by their parents or “caregivers” today who will not get balloons or a parade, who won’t get media coverage, who were not “abducted” in the ways we recognize as abduction in this culture — instead, we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or born into the wrong family or otherwise unfortunate enough not to get abused by someone that the media deems newsworthy. We won’t get settlements. We won’t get cover stories. We will look for just a couple folks to really listen to what happened to us, and most of our friends will tune us out and wonder when we’re going to get over it.

The folks who are abducted and held captive have experienced something horrible and deserve our compassion, our witness. They deserve justice. They deserve for this not to have happened to them.

And the kid who’s being misused by her mother’s boyfriend this morning: she deserves the same thing. She deserves Chris Matthews to be horrified on her behalf, taking up an entire news program spilling this guy’s name and face for the country to witness, shaming him for his crimes and violations, and holding her up for us to applaud: you are so strong and brave; you dealt with so much horror; we as a country are going to help you heal. Imagine if we all got that message.

We all deserve for our communities to notice what is being done to us and to take action on our behalf. We deserve to have our traumas taken seriously.

No matter how much we deserve it, most of us are not rescued. We save ourselves. We run away, physically or psychically or both. We cut off family. We cut off parts of ourselves.  We stop coming home from school. We get married to someone who will take us out of the situation. We drink or drug to escape. We dive into work or school. We find ingenious and brilliant ways to get away — Yes, some of those tactics our psyches come up with aren’t going to serve us in the long term — and then we will rescue ourselves again. We go through this practice again and again and again. Sometimes that’s called self-parenting.

We save ourselves and then we do not find praise for our accomplishments, even within ourselves. Often, instead, we criticize ourselves for taking so long to get away (at least, I do this — do you, too). What if we took some time to celebrate how we became our own knight in shining armor? What if we said thanks? What would that look like, to honor the self that chose to live?

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
What does rescue mean for you this morning? Maybe you’ve already written about the Cincinnati case — maybe you want to write about rescue more broadly. Were you (or your character) rescued? What did your escape look like? What would it look like for you to celebrate how you have saved yourself? Give yourself twenty minutes with this today, if you can take that time — or ten minutes for the write and ten minutes to breathe into whatever comes up for you as you write. Follow the words wherever they seem to want you to go.

Thank you for the brilliant and scary work you did and are continuing to do to get free from trauma. Thank you for holding others in your community as they do the same. Thank you on this Monday for your words.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

give yourself some slow

Posted on May 10, 2013 | 1 Comment

Good morning – it’s slow here where I am, slow in my belly and bones, slow in the opening eyes, slow in the water boiling, slow in the release of night to sun. It’s Friday, when things should be moving toward break and weekend, but not for the self-employed. Where do you find breaktime? How does Friday slow itself to greet you? Are you rushing headlong into this day, just ready to just get it over with?

This week I am thinking a lot about workaholism and stress, I am thinking about the cultural messages I get as an American to work harder work harder — if you’re tired or anxious or there’s too much to do: work harder. Don’t stop. Push through the tired. Yes, you’re overwhelmed — just keep working. You can get through it. I am thinking about how I have internalized these messages: just keep going, Jen. You can do this. Don’t stop. You just gotta power through.

And how, when I’m overwhelmed, those sorts of messages just drive me right into shutdown. Everything in me slows down, whether I want it to or not. It’s as though my body knows something it doesn’t want to tell me. Or, no, wait: my body  is telling me all the time: more and more and faster and faster isn’t better. Working harder isn’t the way to get more done. Working slower is.

Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

more introvert love

Posted on May 8, 2013 | 2 Comments

After getting back from Chicago a couple of weeks ago, I had to take some time to re-settle into my skin. As much as I love being at conferences, meeting and getting to write with new people, it’s also a challenge for me as an introvert – spending a lot of time with other people drains my energy. I want a better word than that – because it sounds as though that means that being with other people was a wholly negative thing, and that’s not the case: just because I’m introverted doesn’t mean that I don’t like and need to be with other people sometimes! But what it does mean is that my energy stores are not fed by spending time with other people, as is the case with extroverts. After a lot of social time, I tend to need time alone to replenish my energy stores, to get back into some kind of deep connect with all the different parts of me.

 Our US culture tends to privilege extroverted qualities: we like gregariousness, friendliness, folks who are comfortable in a crowd –  we like people who make decisions and act, who are outgoing, who appear fearless. Introverts are also often called ‘loners,’ and loners are consistently miscast as isolated, deviant, brooding and mentally ill (and, of course, mentally ill is generally offered up as a negative characteristic, despite the fact that many, many, many of us struggle with depression, PTSD, anxiety, and other neurobiological and psychological processes that keep us away from a whole-bodied and comfortable engagement with everyday life). Most folks who have committed crimes of public terrorism are referred to by the press as loners. The loner isn’t trusted: ours is a pack-based society. Who wouldn’t want to run with the crowd?

 I read a great book many years ago called Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto – I found this book toward the end of my first marriage, when I was trying to understand why I wanted to be alone all the time. Maybe it wasn’t just the depression, or the trauma aftermath. Maybe there was something else going on for me, too. I used to describe myself as having ‘people overload’ when I spent too much time with others, either in large or small groups or even just too much time with one other person: I would get cranky, short-tempered, and feel physically out of sorts; my skin would feel like it wasn’t hanging quite right on my body. What I often did to ‘right’ myself again was to write – which meant, of course, that I’d be alone for a period of time, just me and the notebook and the cup of coffee. I would have time alone driving to and from the coffee shop, and during that couple of hours of transit and writing practice, I would begin to feel my whole self emerging back into my skin again.

 Are you like this? Have you felt guilty about it, too? I used to feel terrible, like it meant that I didn’t want friends, or didn’t want to be with my lover – but I’ve come to understand that being introverted doesn’t mean those things. I tend to partner with folks who are more extroverted, and who have different energetic needs than I have. It’s a powerful thing to learn the language for these internal experiences. When I tell my sweetheart that I need some time alone, I’m not saying, “I don’t want to be with you.” I’m saying, “I need to replenish my energy stores so that I can be more present with you when we’re together.”

 There’s a physio-emotional transition that occurs in me when I’ve been alone enough to get ready to welcome time with other people again. There will be a kind of urge or ache that rises up to the forefront, a little wave of loneliness or longing. I used to criticize this about myself – what’s the matter with you, Jen? Can’t you decide what you want? As though I had to always and only want either to be alone or with others. Isn’t it ok to be both/and?

 I’m still learning to pay attention to these energetic rhythms, and how to best offer myself what I need in the moment. If I feel guilty about wanting or needing to spend time alone, I often engage in behaviors that don’t actually feed me (like watching too much television); if I spend too much time with others, after I know I need to take a break, I tend to start feeling like I’m wearing a plastic face.

Allowing myself to be in my own rhythms is the practice for today – one I’m still learning. One I’ll maybe always be learning. Maybe you’re practicing this, too. Be easy with yourself, ok?

Thank you.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

introvert self care

Posted on May 7, 2013 | 7 Comments

Good Tuesday morning to you — how is the air circling itself around your body this morning? How is the weather in your lungs? How is the breath of your eyes?

This morning I am sleepy. Yesterday I was sleepy. I started writing yesterday’s blog post, wanted to talk about sleep deprivation and radical self care — you may have noticed that I didn’t finish that post. Instead, I took myself offline for the day.

After a week of being on, extending and expending energy, connecting with people, talking, workshopping, promoting; after getting up early for this blogging and then staying up late for online workshop processing or workshops or meetings or get-togethers with friends, yesterday I hit a place of solid depletion.

I don’t know what happens to extroverts when they get tired or exhausted or overwhelmed. I feel like I never see it. For me, as an introvert, what happens is that I grind–internally, and then externally–to a complete halt. I imagine that folks can see it, the way my eyes feel like they’re glazing over, how the very bones in my face begin to ache from too much smiling and interaction with others; I start not to be able to form complete or even remotely complicated sentences: from “I was surprised to find that the character in that story had so much to say about the nature of good and evil in advanced-capitalist, white-supremacist America, in his construction as a neconservative, post-radical queer Black bookstore owner” to “god that guy was annoying, right?” — and even that begins to devolve into simple head shakes and stares off into the distance. I cease to be able to interact.

This is what depletion feels like. When I expend too much energy outward, with and towards other people, without taking time to be alone and replenish, then I hit this sort of wall. Yesterday I took a necessary mental health day, began the restoration process with quiet and with silly tv. I spent almost no time interacting with others, so that I was recharged enough to be able to show up psychically for the Monday night Write Whole workshop.

I don’t quite know what to say today. I don’t know how to be helpful when I am depleted this way. In this month of radical self love, why would I extend myself so far that I can’t even speak anymore? Why is this our business model, this unsustainable idea that we must network and interact and offer ourselves until we have nothing left?

My goal is to pay closer attention. As someone working alone and for herself, it’s my job to pay attention to staff self-care. I can always tell when what I call “people overload” is beginning to encroach on my psyche. The next step in my self-care project would be to begin to replenish before I’ve hit bottom, before I feel like an empty and dried-out well, before the candle burning at both ends is extinguished.

How do you replenish when you’re feeling worn out? What does your introvert self care look like? If you’re an extrovert, do you know how to tell when you’re feeling depleted? What are the ways that you fill up the well again?

Thanks for your spaciousness with the exhaustion of those around you. Thanks for the ways you encourage others to care for themselves by the way you model taking care of you. Thanks for your words — I’m always grateful for your words.

 

→ 7 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged ,

her garden is my best hope

Posted on May 3, 2013 | 1 Comment

Good morning, you gorgeousness out there. It’s all sun and cool breeze and spring open outside the window, almost warm enough to take the notebook out write directly into morning. My mother writes a couple of days ago to tell me that it snowed back home in Nebraska — in May. It’s just not right. I look out at my garden while we’re texting back and forth, I think of the lettuces, the spinach and broccoli and herbs that we’re already harvesting; I think of the tiny green tomato taking shape on the vine. I remember how devastating it used to be, when I was living in Maine, when the crocus were well blooming and the redbuds had taken firm hold on the maples and I’d begun to trust that finally, finally, spring had arrived — my bones could relax. And then, boom, more snow.

I don’t tell my mom that I spent her snow day out in the sun. She has only just begun to set out her garden — has the potatoes in, is turning over the wintered soil to prepare the space for her many tomato plants, the okra and eggplant, all the annual flowers. Her garden is my best hope. It’s from my mother’s gardening that I learned about the longevity of faith, about persistence of effort, about doing it anyway. She kept a garden all the way through until the very end of the time with her abusive second partner; through all his control and rabid mania, through his sobbing manipulations, through the spending that forced her to work more and more hours trying to reconcile the books and accounts that he refused to be responsible for, through the hostility and hatefulness that he forced her to refer to as love, through all the behind-closed-doors horror that she has never described to me,  she found time to hold on to her connection to the earth, to find solace in a thumb so green she could lift life from a toxic wasteland (which, it turned out, she would have to learn to do).

I don’t know how late into that marriage she kept her garden. I don’t know if her tomatoes were putting out fruit when he was arrested for incest and child sexual abuse, and she was arrested alongside him as an accessory after the fact. I don’t remember, just now, what time of year it was, and I’d been away from home for a few years: he may have driven her away from her garden, the way he’d driven her from cooking and baking and writing, the deep loam of her creative life.

I don’t know what it meant to her that he was not arrested or charged or held to any account for what he did to her.

What I know is that my mother gardens now. After many years rebuilding herself — sharing home with others, cocooning in an old Omaha red-brick apartment building, over a Czech restaurant — she offers her words into the world again, she bakes bread for every family gathering, and she has her own home with a garden she can shape any way she wishes. No one can tell her what to plant or not to plant, or where, or how. At any hour, during the spring and summer and fall, her neighbors find her there, in her sunhat and shorts, pulling weeds, tending to the herbs, talking to the skunk under the porch or the squirrels that want into her birdfeeder or the butterflies that find their way to her flowers — she has shaped her whole wide yard into garden.

And for all my disappointment and loss, for all that we struggle still to find a way to each other as honest and open mother and daughter in the aftermath of the betrayal that that man demanded of both of us, still when I go out into the gardens now I am following in her footsteps. I am listening her tell my much younger self how to set out the plants, how to water, how to tend. I am listening to her example: how she fingered the leaves, whispered to each new seedling, welcomed all the life that found its way into the soil she’d taken responsibility for. Later today, I’ll bake bread for a friend — and I will remember watching my young mother at the counter in a new house in the farmlands of Nebraska, how she put her whole body into her kneading and how, now that I am years older than she was then, and in spite of all that came between, I am still learning from her examples.

~~ ~~ ~~

I didn’t imagine I’d write about this when I set my timer for twenty minutes today. Do you have something surprising rising in you to write today? Give yourself fifteen minutes at least, take a coffee break and a notebook, head out to the breakroom or the back of your building, and drop into the words. Follow your writing wherever it seems to want you to go.

I’m grateful, today, for the way you make room for what’s complicated about what and who you love.  I’m grateful for your spaciousness, and I’m grateful for your words.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

the girl who took words with her everywhere she went

Posted on May 2, 2013 | 3 Comments

Good morning! I set my timer for twenty minutes and dive into this blog. Where I want to be is back in bed. These are the mornings that don’t make sense to me. Sometimes the writing just comes hard, or feels like it’s not coming at all. I sit at the keyboard or open the notebook and uncap my pen, and my brain becomes a cloudless day on the prairie: nothing to see here — move along. Put me anywhere else, and the stories, the urge for words, the articles and writes shove all over the place for space in my attention. Put me in the shower and I get all the best ideas for the most brilliant poems — then sit me back down at the notebook: poof.

Some writes are like that. Yesterday I went for a run in the woods with my sweetheart — I am still learning how to run. A few weeks ago I made it all the way around Lake Merritt without stopping, and I thought, I did it! I learned how to run! And then I did it again, and then I had a break from running, and now it’s hard to go for much more than a mile without having to walk. Goddamnit, I think. I broke the spell. So I breathe hard, walk a ways, and then start running again. It’s just like on the page. Sometimes the words flow like sudden summer storm (if I can just be the most cliche, please), and some days it’s like this: stuttery, stop-and-start; pause, put the laundry in the dryer, get back to the keyboard, remember I wanted coffee, jump up and get the cup, sit back down and type a few more sentences, remember I was supposed to get the trash out now that I can hear the garbagefolks banging their way down the road, start to stand then force myself back into the chair — write, damnit.

Less flowy, maybe. But nothing’s broken. You didn’t break it just because today was harder than yesterday. Be in persistence. Be in curiosity: Oh, it’s like this today — what will that be like?

Move on into the day. If your body is ready, if no one comes, you can go write for your novel. Go to the cafe in your hiking clothes. Remember yourself into someone who loved to write. Remember yourself into the girl who took words with her everywhere she went. Remember yourself into that child with the strong arms and powerful legs, the one who ran and biked and everything was words. You made up stories every minute you were alone — you talked story to the cardinals and blue jays that called from the tops of oaks and elms on your walk home from school, you made story while you built lego castles for your little people long after you were too old to be playing with those toys, you made story while you rode your bike around quiet summer weekday streets. These were stories about love and romance, stories about friends who betrayed and then forgave each other, long-built and long-unwinding dramas. You made story about girls who achieved greatness — but mostly your stories were about playing house for real. You have always been writing love songs, just like your father. Remember yourself into the eyes that watched delightedly, with wonder, as the fat pencil moved across the grey-brown paper with the blue lines; your head on your left elbow while you watched your right hand make letters, and those letters made words: c – a – t. Look! Remember yourself into the girl who read before kindergarten, the girl who couldn’t get enough books, who carried words with her wherever she went. Remember yourself into that place of play, where the words weren’t work, where the words were something more than freedom, weren’t just fun, they were breath. You inhaled and exhaled this earliest love, the way that small marks emerged from the paper and made letters, that letters came together and made words that you could never unsee, that words could go together and create worlds.

On the days when the words come hard, can you remember yourself into that self? Set your timer for ten minutes, and follow your writing wherever it wants to take you today.

Here’s to Pipi. Here’s to silliness and play. Here’s to writing for the hell of it. Here’s to your words.

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

a world larger than the tight wound I’d come to inhabit

Posted on May 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

Good morning — it’s finally beginning to feel like “early” when I wake up. Today the alarm went off at 5, and I started that inside conversation:

you keep saying you want to get up early, come on, now

but I’m so tired. do I really have to get up?

It goes on like that for awhile; I won’t repeat all the parts.  Outside, it’s still quiet. Outside, it’s still dark. Here at my desk, I actually need the candle, and even though I’m yawning, I’m so glad to be here. I’ve missed the sense of being at the computer so early that I can barely remember what it is that I’m saying as I type it, and my head says: what are we doing here? and outside the birds are still asleep and, back up in the North Bay, this would be the time that the owls were talking to each other. No owls yet here in midtown Oakland. No deer either. The wildlife look different here.

Still, this is what I know: the earlier I can rise, the more writing I can do in the morning before I have to go in to “work.” Also, the earlier I’ll get tired, so the (ostensibly) easier it will be to get up and do it again tomorrow. Why am I telling you all of this? Because it’s early, and I’m tired. And I’m proud of myself for getting out of bed.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

This morning I am thinking about trauma and community, about intimacy and how we learn to find something like home in others after home turned out to be the unsafest place of all. Last night I went to hear my friend Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore read from her latest book, The End of San Francisco. It’s a novel memoir, wrangling with hope and possibility in communities that crumble, communities of folks who are all facing death all the time– Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

So many ways to write your stories! (Late Spring & Summer with Writing Ourselves Whole)

Posted on April 30, 2013 | Leave a comment

heart vidaWe’ve got a lot of writing opportunities coming up in the next couple of months! If you’re ready to write into your own intersections of trauma and desire, this could be the time to join us.

Summer 2013 Schedule

“I Masturbate:” a writing class in honor of National Masturbation Month
THIS SATURDAY, May 4, 12-3pm, $25-50 sliding scale
Center for Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission St., San Francisco
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/376758
May is National Masturbation/Radical Self-Love Month, and in conjunction with Shilo McCabe’s “I Masturbate…” photo exhibition, the Center of Sex and Culture wants to give you the opportunity to celebrate the power of masturbation and radical self-love! No previous writing experience necessary! At the end of our three hours together, participants will have several new, hot and surprising pieces of writing, will be connected with a supportive creative community, and be warmed up for a month of radical self love!

Writing the Flood. A monthly writing workshop open to all
Meets the third Saturday of every month
Limited to 12. Fee is $50 (with a sliding scale)
Meets in private workshop space in Oakland, near Lake Merritt
Write in response to exercises designed to get those pens moving, and get onto the page the stories that have been too long stuck inside
Next Flood Write meets Saturday, May 18

Liberatory Potential of Writing Desire (Let’s Write About Sex!)
June 8, 2013 10am-5pm
Sacramento, CA
A day-long writing group with AWA Sacramento
To register, write to John Crandall at john@fireartsofsacramento.com
Expand the depth and breadth of your writing, discover the gorgeous creativity of your erotic self, and celebrate your individual erotic story. Spend the day writing joy back into your body and your sexuality. In a community of engaged and encouraging peer writers, try out some heated and surprising new writing, and find out how empowering a creative engagement with sexuality, sensuality, desire, and fantasy can be.

Write Whole-Survivors Write. Open to all survivors of trauma
8 Monday evenings beginning July 8, 2013.
Fee: $350 (ask about scholarship/payment plan, if needed)
Meets in private workshop space in Oakland, near Lake Merritt
Gather with other trauma survivors and write in response to exercises chosen to elicit deep-heart writing around such subjects as body image, family/community, sexuality, dreams, love, faith, and more.

Reclaiming Our Erotic Story: Open to all lgbtq women survivors of sexual trauma
8 Tuesday evenings beginning July 9, 2013.
Fee: $350 (ask about scholarship/payment plan, if needed)
Meets in private workshop space in Oakland, near Lake Merritt
Find community around the complexity of desire, and transform your relationship with your creative self through explicit erotic writing.

Dive Deep: An advanced manuscript/project workgroup
Next series begins begins July 2013
Fee: $200/month (multiple-month commitment)
Limited to 6 members per group
Meets in private workshop space in Oakland, near Lake Merritt
Designed for those working on (or committing to) a larger project, such as a novel or memoir. Divers meet three times per month for writing, project check-in/accountability, feedback, coaching and peer support.

Online writing groups
Summer sessions begin June 24, 2013
If you are not comfortable joining an in-person group, we offer Write Whole and Reclaiming Our Erotic Story online!

All workshops facilitated by Jen Cross. Register here!

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged ,