About a month ago, I committed to posting longer, more well-thought-out answers to the questions that Britt Bravo posed to me during our Arts and Healing Network podcast conversation. Here’s my answer for day seven!
7. How has [facilitating] the workshops changed your own writing?
I think the most important impact that the workshops have had on my own work is an encouragement to be more, and more consistently, brave.
Each week I get to write with folks who are taking chances, finding new language for old pains, old desires, or new and surprising ones. Every week I am inspired by these writers’ braveries, their risk and subtle (and not-so-subtle!) implosion of yet another barrier to connection with others, of demands to silence, of old trainings. The way we often go ahead and read aloud the work we hate, the work that scares us to have written, the work that seems to make no sense, the work that is “too” stream of consciousness, “too” organized, “too” truthful or “too” fictional.” The way Pat Schneider organized the AWA method makes it feel ok, feel possible, for folks to “go there” in their writing, to speak the unmentionables, to create a story for that thing without words.
I am someone who believes that you ought not ask someone to do something you haven’t, or wouldn’t, do yourself–so I am driven to step into similar risk. To let myself try on words for a big fear, a big loss, a big shame, a big longing. To let myself strip out the words to a new story that needs an old telling. The folks I’ve written with since 2002 encourage me over and over purely through their example to take more risks in my writing, to follow the truths in my writing, as they do, to say what isn’t supposed to be said., like they do, to claim my multiplicity of voices, like they do. This is the most profound effect that facilitating these workshops has had on my work.
The fact that I’m always reading aloud what I’ve just written means my work, overall, is more performative, more ready to be performed, because I’m writing it with the knowledge that I will most often be reading it aloud – that means I pay a different quality of attention, even unintentionally, to how the words will sound when I bring them up off the page and into my lungs, off my tongue and into the room. 
Most of the pieces I performed on this year’s Body Heat: Femme porn tour were written in an AWA-method workshop, either Writing Ourselves Whole or Laguna Writers workshops, first read there, first received in these crucibles of risk and transformation and possibility – and those receptions paved the way for a more public (nation-wide!) reading!
These are the biggest effects on my own writing of facilitating the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops – in addition, of course, to writing a whole lot more regularly. What about for you? Are there ways that working/writing in one of the Writing Ourselves Whole or another AWA-method workshop has impacted your writing?
Remember the guidelines of the AWA method writing workshops (as developed by Pat Schneider in her book 
I initially imagined a writing group that would be open to women of all sexual orientations who wanted to explore issues related to sexuality as we live it and struggle with it, wanted to create something different from a survivor’s support group, something more along the lines of the sex-writing workshops I had attended at OutWrite, the queer writer’s conference that used to be held in Boston every February: “Come and spend an hour writing dyke smut,” the copy in the conference program would entice. I always went and wrote, and simultaneously sat uneasily in the ever-present conflict of gender, sexual desire, language, and history. No one in the room wanted to talk about the difficulties some of us had with sex. Didn’t we hear about sexual problems enough? Couldn’t we just please come together and spend an hour writing hot queer sex? 
And after I’d been doing the work with survivors and women-identified folks only for awhile, I started an erotic writing workshop that was not survivor-focused and was open to everyone – folks who identify across all those gender and sexuality spectrums. What an opportunity, to write with folks very different from you about erotic longing, and get to experience all the similarities where you’d thought for sure there’d be differences, get to hear the differences where you were sure there’d be similarities, get to have assumptions about the correlation of desire with identity dismantled, all while getting, too, to do some fun and hot writing.
Writing saved my life. Isn’t that true for so many of us? If I hadn’t had that outlet back when I was 20 and 21 and trying to figure out what had really happened to me, trying to come to a new sense of myself in relationship to words like ‘woman,’ ‘sexuality,’ ‘incest,’ ‘gay,’ and more, I wouldn’t have had any outlet at all, and I think I would have slipped fully into the word ‘crazy.’
Yes, I absolutely believe art can heal. Why? Because it has done so for me, and I watch it work for others.
Transformative writing is writing that changes you in the process of its creation. A dictionary gives one definition of transform as “to change completely for the better.” Another definition: “to convert one form of energy to another.”
I’m talking about the fact that the process of writing itself can be an erotic experience, if we can engage a definition of “erotic” that’s closer to Audre Lorde’s (“I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way. And when I say living I mean it as that force which moves us toward what will accomplish real positive change.” 
The first question on the list:
Even if you have not written in years, even if you “only” write in a journal, even if you worry about your spelling when you put words to the page.
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