Your facilitator, Jennifer Cross, is an experienced group facilitator and has been certified in the
Amherst Writers & Artists method, described in Pat
Schneider's book Writing Alone and With Others, Oxford University Press
(2003).
Like so many others, I've been in love with writing, words and books since I was very young. My relationship with writing is a thing ever in flux, although I'm grateful to be at the point in my life where writing can hold a central place. I've been publishing my work for about a decade now.
I've been facilitating writing groups since 2002, and this work has changed and opened my life! I got to talk about that recently when I participated in a podcast interview with Britt Bravo of the Arts and Healing Network; we discussed the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops, the powerful and transformative uses of writing, and more: Jen_Cross__Writing_Ourselves_Whole.mp3
Here's another brief interview on the Goddard IMA blog where I talk some about how I came to be doing this work!
I received my MA in
Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College,
where I studied and wrote about the ways in which erotic writing can be used as a
tool for sexual- and self-healing.
A writer/performer, I've gotten to feature at such events as Sizzle, Writers With Drinks, the National Queer Arts Festival, and the Queer Open Mic. I read in LitQuake’s LitCrawl, 2006 and 2008, pouring out porn for capacity crowds at GoodVibes. And I get to co-facilitate (with Carol Queen) a monthly Erotic Reading Circle at the Center for Sex and Culture!
I've led or co-led workshops: with student activists at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH; with LGBTQQ youth at OutRight in Portland, Maine; at the University of Oregon at Eugene; with Touchstone Writers in Burlington, Vermont; at Goddard College and at the Power of Words/Transformative Language Arts annual conference; at Miko in Providence, RI; at True Colors Bookstore (formerly Amazon Bookstore) in Minneapolis, MN; and with the UCSF Med Center’s Art for Recovery Program in San Francisco, CA.
Where can I find Jen's writing?
There's a list of my publications here!
Most recently, my writing has appeared in the Femmethologies, Frenzy, Best Sex Writing 2008, Nobody Passes, Best Women's Erotica 2007, as well as on Ignaviapress.com and CleanSheets.com. I have been published in anthologies, newsletters and newspapers, and continue to seek out new venues and publishing opportunities. I am currently working on several longer projects (a collection of short fiction, a collection of poetry and other pieces of indeterminate genre, and the collection of essays that was my thesis project), as well as generating and polishing shorter pieces.