San Francisco Women Against Rape is once again offering the Fearless Words Creative Writing Workshop for women survivors of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and child sexual abuse. Group begins May 26. Eight Tuesday evenings, 6-8pm at The Women’s Building San Francisco (18th and Valencia). Woman-identified writers of all levels are invited to attend this workshop, created especially for survivors of sexual violence to discover our voices, create political dialogue and develop our craft as writers, while using writing as a medium of healing and transformation. Facilitated by Jen Cross, this group is free, wheelchair accessible, and runs 8 weeks. Call Tabitha at 415/861-2024 for a short intake interview or for more information. Thank you!
Tag Archives: Fearless Words
Fearless Words: A free writing workshop for women survivors begins May 26!
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Tagged Fearless Words, SFWAR, survivors write
NaBloPoMo #15: I get clean by writing it
Today’s post comes from the Fearless Words writing group — our prompt came from the group itself: how do we get clean?
How do you get clean? You know — inside? How do you begin to release that sense that you are dirty, soiled, smeared with someone else’s stain?
We took about 8 minutes — and this is what came for me (with only small edits):
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Tagged Fearless Words, radical self care!, trauma aftermath, workshop write
NaBloPoMo #10: She did fight back
Again, I’m sharing a prompt and a write from a Fearless Words group meeting. For this exercise, we first wrote for three minutes from each of the following phrases: I remember / I don’t remember / I wish I remembered / I wish I didn’t remember… then we took 8 more minutes to write about anything we wanted.
Here’s what came up for me:
I remember sitting slow on the back porch. I remember there was no back porch. I remember the concrete of the back patio, the smell of the yew hedge that separated the patio from mom’s garden, and how ugly those hedges were. I remember felling lost most of the time, and feeling broken and wanting to be really lost and not knowing how to run away. I remember when I understood I shouldn’t write anything real in my journals because he might read them —
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Tagged Fearless Words, re-membering the stories, workshop write
NaBloPoMo #6: she didn’t quit
For this write (the second for this week’s Fearless Words group), because we’d been talking about ways we reclaim our bodies, I invited us to write to a prompt from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Two Countries” – Skin had hope. That’s what skin does.
We took about 10 minutes. Here’s what came for me:
I have been looking back at old journals recently, reading the self I was at 29 when my ex-wife and I had just lost a child and I, only five years out of my stepfather’s abuse and control and mental manipulation, was trying to do everything right — mourn right, partner right, be an adult right, study right, show up right. The self that shows up in those old journals is hard to read — she feels self-centered, whiny, repetitive, closed. I get embarrassed for her, for me — my god, did I really sound like that? And then I pull back, remember all she was carrying, all she was grieving, all the healing she hadn’t even begun to be able to consider doing yet. And then I am grateful for that 29-year old self. For showing up, day after day, putting one foot in front of the other, one word in front of the other. For continuing to have hope. For continuing to desire, even when she had every single reason in anybody’s logical world to quit desiring and just sit still and stop. She had earned the fucking right to quit, and she didn’t.
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Tagged Fearless Words, Naomi Shihab Nye, workshop write
NaBloPoMo #3: rewriting the broken story
(All right, November — I see your challenge. No problem. So we won’t do a post every day this month. But we’ll still have 30 posts. So there.)
Last night at Fearless Words, for our first prompt, we created a list of myths and stories that get told about survivors (for example, that we are weak, asking for it, too needy, too emotional, not strong enough to just get over it, brave and strong all the time, not good enough, dirty, stupid, and so on…) Then we talked back to those messages —
We had fifteen minutes. Here’s what I wrote:
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Tagged Fearless Words, not broken, workshop write
Fearless Words: A free writing workshop for women survivors (with SFWAR!)
San Francisco Women Against Rape is offering our Fearless Words Creative Writing Workshop for women survivors of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and child sexual abuse. Group begins August 28. Eight Wednesdays, 6-8pm at The Women’s Building San Francisco (18th and Valencia). Woman-identified writers of all levels are invited to attend this workshop, created especially for survivors of sexual violence to discover our voices, create political dialogue and develop our craft as writers, while using writing as a medium of healing and transformation. Facilitated by Jen Cross, this group is free, wheelchair accessible, and runs 8 weeks. Call Tabitha at 415/861-2024 for a short intake interview or for more information. Thank you!
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Tagged Fearless Words, sexual trauma, SFWAR, survivors writing workshop
Fearless Words: A free writing workshop for women survivors (with SFWAR!)
San Francisco Women Against Rape is offering our Fearless Words Creative Writing Workshop for women survivors of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and child sexual abuse. Beginning June 4 (just two weeks away!) Eight Wednesdays, 6-8pm at The Women’s Building San Francisco (18th and Valencia) Woman-identified writers of all levels are invited to attend this workshop created especially for survivors of sexual violence to discover our voices, create political dialogue and develop our craft as writers, while using writing as a medium of healing and transformation. Facilitated by Jen Cross, this group is free, wheelchair accessible, and runs 8 weeks. Call Lisa at 415/861-2024 ext. 302 for a short intake interview or for more information. Thank you!
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Tagged Fearless Words, sexual abuse, SFWAR, survivors workshop, writing workshops