young child frisking a soldier -- Bansky graffiti in bethlehem.
Note: this morning’s write contains some specific language around sexual violence. Just a heads-up. xox, Jen
Sit down here like you’re sitting in front of a page.
Tag Archives: sexual trauma
don’t you think you’re over it by now?
Today I’ve got a couple of exciting new things on my plate:
First, there’s the inaugural workshop with medical education staff at UCSF! I’m thinking about freewriting as professional development, about creativity as a team-building practice, and about the benefits of engaging with and encouraging the “flow” that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes in his books, including Flow: The psychology of optimal experience.
Then, second, I’ll head over to the Pacific School of Religion and spend some time talking with Sharon Bray‘s class (Writing as a Healing Ministry) about writing (about sex and not about sex) with/as sexual trauma survivors.
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Tagged healing through writing, poem, prompts, sexual trauma, trauma aftermath
we are elastic beings who are ever becoming new
(check this out -- 'reverse' graffiti!)
5:43am — what would I be writing about this morning if I had the time, if I could be writing about anything I wanted? Last night the bus took an hour and a half to make a 45 minute trip because traffic on Lombard was so heavy — everyone wanted to get across the Golden Gate. I was tired of words and wanted to be home. I nearly fell asleep on the bus, dozed a little, got a sleepy mouth. Sometimes I get tired of words the way I get tired of the smell of my own body, with a kind of sickening overwhelm, because I can’t get away. There’s no break for me from words. Words are my only mechanism, only medium, only practice. They’re my work and my hobby. Last night I came home and drank wine and ate the red beans and rice F! had made, then ate cheese and crackers, then ate ice cream. I watched tv. If I’d turned off the tv, I’d have been left with words. I wanted to breathe without them for a little bit. I wanted to step outside of that structuring of my brain, which I didn’t, not really, but tv drugs you and makes you think you’re free. The clouds outside look like dark smoke in the early sky. The garbage truck looks like hungry.
The Monday night Write Whole workshop is going and gorgeous, even though the registration is quite small. The Tuesday night DOE workshop I’ve had to cancel again because only a few people had any interest, only two indicated they’d register and only one followed through. What happens? I had the idea that many people would want to take an erotic writing workshop, figured that, of course, when I opened the groups up to everyone, folks of all genders, that I might lose some of the women who’d wanted to take the women-only workshop, but I’d get a lot more people who didn’t fit or feel comfortable in those groups: that hasn’t been the case. Maybe it’s because I’m not known, I’m not advertising enough, I don’t have a book or a regular (like, consistent), sexy image: I’m not out there blogging and twittering and facebooking about sex, my own sex and others, I’m not really putting out that this is what I do. And frankly, right now, it isn’t what I do: I haven’t been doing a lit of sex writing, except when I’ve got a workshop on. Otherwise, what do I write about? trauma. flowers. workshops.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged creativity, erotic writing, liberatory uses of writing, ptsd, sexual trauma, survivors, writing ourselves whole
Turn story under story
This is a write from the Monday night Write Whole workshop. The prompt asked each of us to create two lists, one of the stories we tell often, another of the stories we don’t tell. Here’s my response:
There are stories I’m desperate to tell / the backhand side to my coming out-incest story / stories that are all interwoven in someone else’s pain / the truths other people aren’t willing to spill yet / I mean, people in my family, I mean / people I love.
There are parts that involve my sister, my / dad, and I don’t just want to write them in my notebook, I want to write them to share / but because I can’t share their stories / I don’t write them at all.
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Tagged prompts, sexual trauma, trauma aftermath, workshop write, write whole, writing
Bearing my chest to the mouth of the world
The prompt was “a love letter to the body.” Folks can interpret this all sorts of ways — I often find myself offering these letters to one part of my body or another, usually some part that I feel (especially) complicated about. This time, well, I think you can pretty quickly tell which part I’m needing to send some love to.
It’s true that I have been grateful for your heft and weight ever since you had any heft and weight. I should apologize now for those months, just as you were budding, that I squeezed you (well, us) into two sizes too-small tube tops (wasn’t that one kind of a grassy green, and ribbed or ruffly or something?) in front of the full-length mirror in the basement of mom’s duplex apartment on California Street — you were all stifled, unable to breathe, but I puffed you out and paraded like a girl was supposed to, bent my arms back like not-yet-broken wings and posed for the dank and empty room while little sqares of sunlight flowed in from the small windows high up on the cement wall. I was trying to hurry you along, wanted the big, full curves of Farrah Fawcett, maybe, or HotLips Houlihan, or, yeah, Daisy Duke — who else would I/we have been inspired by back then? Maybe elementary school teachers, and a couple of classmates whose development had already, well, developed. We didn’t have anything especial to show the world for some time, though, did we? Just a flush roundness that seemed small compared to everything we noted, the girls who wore tight t-shirts, the porn underneath my parent’s bed.
When did you flesh out so nice for me? By the time I was in college, I was cupping you in fine fake lace (remember that one green bra? a grown up version of that tube top, now with something to form itself around) and offering you more readily to others’ eyes. We wore frills under leather jackets or oxford shirts and admired the contrast. I was just learning how to appreciate all the curves I’d longed for back a decade earlier, but then it became much safer to flatten you down beneath sports bras, to clothe my own self in boy garb and butch realness, though even then I just couldn’t cotton to how the guys wanted to do away with their girl bits, from their tits on down, the guys who’d been horrified at how girl developed over and onto their bodies, the bodies they’d just learned to be comfortable in as little boys — but not me, remember? This was something I kept my mouth closed about, lest I reveal myself (even further) as not a real butch: I adored my breasts. Even as I reached out toward transitioning, set my safety against the idea of walking in the world only as male, what stopped me was this: how could I give you up? I cupped my hands around you, when I was alone, and couldn’t reconcile these realities.
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Tagged healing, prompts, sexual trauma, sexuality, workshop write
reminder: Queering Sexual Violence submissions due 5/1!
(reposting — and please pass the word! –xox, Jen)
It is getting down to the last few days for submissions, however, I will accept them throughout the month of May. I have some people who needed extensions so I can wait a bit if you need one as well. Also, if you have a piece that has been published before that can be reused that you think might be perfect, please feel free to submit that as well! Hope to get a piece from you!!
Queering Sexual Violence
An anthology of LGBTQ writers, survivors and activists confronting heterosexual privilege and the gender binary system while creating a dialog about the limitations of the anti-sexual violence movement.
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Tagged calls for submissions, sexual trauma, sexuality, survivors
After reading Minnie Bruce Pratt’s “Justice, Come Down”
(one of my writes from last Monday’s workshop: the prompt, as mentioned in the post’s title, was a reading of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s poem, “Justice, Come Down.”)
I don’t like to write this story, but this is where I wait, with the blackened ash on the back of my tongue: I’m waiting for someone to look there, for someone to see, I want you to notice what I’ve lost, I want it to be a stain, a smear by degrees on my skin. This is where we weather the battle, but I hate war metaphors — it’s inherent in the word survivor, someone who made it through alive. I want a different word, a different metaphor.
I don’t tell my story, I share the facades and shards, the shelved legalese, the patina of identity markers. Telling the story means drooping into vulnerability, means letting in the possibility that you’ll stagger aside after hearing me and let your eyes drop with pity and disappointment.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged sexual trauma, trans, workshop write, writing ourselves whole
Writing Ourselves Whole – early 2010 schedule!
Happy 2010, all!
Here’s a short list of what’s coming for me/writing ourselves whole for the first part of the year — starting next week!
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Tagged AWA, bay area, Body Heat, san francisco, sexual trauma, sexuality, writing ourselves whole, writing workshops
Upcoming survivors and sexuality writing workshops: Write Whole: Survivors Write begins Jan 11!
And we begin again!
~ Welcome in 2010 with some deep writing, community connections, and solidarity with your resilient artist self ~
Our 8-week Write Whole: Survivors Write (for all women survivors of sexual trauma) begins January 11, and we’ve got a half-day queer women’s erotic writing workshop on Jan 30! More info on each is below; spaces are still available — please let me know if you have any questions or would like to register — I’d love to write with you!
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Tagged AWA, declaring our erotic, sexual trauma, write whole, writing workshops