an exclusive reading this Friday — plus staplers!

image -- black stapler holding a tomato

This will make sense if you read on -- honest.

This Friday, Declaring Our Erotic readers are going to participate in a private fundraiser in Oakland for the Growing Connections mural project (www.growingconnectionsmural.com)!  You can join us!

Day/time: Friday, July 30 , 6:30-9pm

There’ll be food and drinks, all offered for a small donation, excellent mingling in a lovely West Oakland location, plus an intimate erotic reading!

Please RSVP for address — space is limited to about 30 guests!
Notes about the location:
There is a nice garden area outside with 3 fire pits.
The space is wheelchair accessible, however the bathrooms are not.
There is a big, furry cat who lives in the space. Anyone who is allergic should consider this.
This is a scented environment; all scents are natural, organic and from essential oils, however scent-sensitive folks will need to be aware of this.

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Saturday, Fresh! and I went to the beach at Bolinas, and I followed my urge to swim — I hadn’t brought a bathing suit, but I had brought a change of clothes, so I walked into the water, with all my clothes on, and swam around for awhile.  I still have sand in my hair, which makes for a lovely Monday morning, I think.

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Last Thursday was the first meeting of the MedEd Writers, a group of writers made up of Medical Education Staff at UCSF. We’re getting together for an hour a week, with the idea that 1) taking time out for a break from your regular work is a good idea, and 2) making space for creative engagement will increase your capacity for creativity all through your work day.

We are going to have a lot of fun, I can tell already.

Here’s one of the exercises I offered at the first meeting: I brought in a desktop-full of office supplies (sticky notes, dry erase markers, a rotary phone, paper clips, puffy manila envelope, folders, clamps, and many more). I asked us to notice which object was choosing us, and then we wrote like this: for 5 minutes, we described what the object is generally used for.  Then, for 5 more minutes, we wrote about what the object would like to be or wished to be used for.

Here’s my response to that prompt:

The stapler brings the paper together, it goes home in the crunching, it levels the playing field so no thing gets lost.  The stapler rocks in your hand, it clusters the diaspora, it brings the disparate together by force and sharp teeth; and the mouth is always open, it knows what it’s looking for, it brings home the bacon.

The stapler wishes it could be a rubber band, something elastic and strummy, forever changing shape with the desire and designs of the beloved, something that holds together with a force that doesn’t have to be pried open.  The stapler would like to clutch together a little girls pigtails, but every time it tries, someone screams and gets angry. It would like to clutch gently someday to a round pile of papers, cylinder-ing them into something you could look through, then unfurl, instead of hammering always with a force like the loss of hope, like it can’t trust you to stay together otherwise.

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This week is tonight’s Write Whole workshop, Thursday’s MedEd workshop, and a grant that’s due to Intersection. What’s on tap for you?

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