Writing the Flood
Open the gates and let your writing voice flow
A half-day, open-topic writing workshop!
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Writing the Flood is this Saturday!
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truths in our fictions
from Dorian Katz's "The Hyena Report" -- click the image to see more of her amazing work...
I need to be at the bus stop in half an hour — yet, here I am in front of the computer and what should be, but isn’t going to be, my morning write. Some writing on the bus, maybe —
Last night was getting to hang out with the very amazing Dorian Katz and Poppers the Pony, and her/their students at Stanford; she’s teaching a class called ” Drawing the Imaginative Figure: Characters, Alter-Egos, Avatars and You,” which I just love; we did some writing exercises designed to bring us into our alter egos. I wish I could spend the rest of the semester with them, seeing what all they do with the characters they were embodying last night! Dorian’s a generous teacher and powerful role-model; imagine if you’d had her as a professor in college!
light through the layers of his lies
Note: this morning’s write contains some explicit writing around sexual violence. Just a heads-up: please be easy with you. xox, Jen
I’m in that very-tired place that comes just before bleeding, at least for me. So my thoughts are slow this morning and I’d like another several hours of sleep.
This month’s Writing the Flood is coming up this Saturday, 10/16: want to come out and write?
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there was glitter, poetry, rage and song
Good morning! I’m back from my travels, and, as you can see, I didn’t manage to get any blogging done while I was out in New England — there was just too much happening! Now I want to tell you about everything that happened, which would require less of a blog and more of a book.
(Wow: it’s nice to be back here with you, though! I missed this space/time with you –)
What’s true is that I got to spend five days doing transformative language arts (TLA): thinking/talking/wondering about it, being with other folks who think/talk/wonder about it, visioning its possible futures, considering the next year of the Transformative Language Arts Network (of which I am the new membership coordinator — expect to hear a lot more about TLAN around these parts), all the while also practicing TLA.
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ww: the place where land trumps human
it's pomegranate season! hooray!
It’s a Tuesday morning and there’s quite a bit that I want to say today, but most of it needs to go into my notebook first, to compost there, to cook through that writing process first and then be ready (be ready?) to grow into something new that might come up here —
Did you have a three-day weekend? Did you take some quiet time for yourself?
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what resilience and growth look like
Good morning! Today is Friday and according to my post schedule-thinking that I did earlier this week, I should/could be talking about writing ourselves whole in general, as a business. WOW-biz or something. It’s going to be a quick post this morning, ’cause I’ve got to get in the shower and get ready for FemmeCon, though, so here’s what I want to say about the business of running a business — I can’t believe that it’s something I’m doing.
For many (many) years, my main work-related goal was to have the easiest possible taxes; my only goal was to be able to file a, what’s that called, an EZ form every April, or to not have to even file the form because I didn’t have anything new or interesting to tell the government about my financial situation. Now I’ve got this thing that I’m doing for love and for part of my livelihood, and I’m working toward having it be all of my livelihood, this writing, workshopping and talking about all of it.
I’ve been in the midst of this organic growing process (or not growing so much, often), and this year I’ve taken a number of major leaps toward having writing ourselves whole be all of what I do with my work life/time: first, applying to Intersection for the Arts’ Incubator project — as a part of the Intersection Incubator, I get to be fiscally sponsored, which means I’m sort of in this excellent inbetween land of nonprofit and not, where I can have access to grants only available to nonprofits and can accept tax-deductible donations, and also continue to do other social entrepreneurial work, grassroots work — that is, not be tied to the nonprofit model. I’m grateful to Intersection for the opportunity to participate in this amazing program, and also to my friend and colleague and role model, Peggy Simmons of Green Windows Writing Groups as well, who investigated and participated in Intersection’s Incubator program first, and shares continually of her wisdom, her learning, her ideas.
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sometimes professional isn’t what you need
I dreamed my sister had a black dog, like the one we had when we were younger, Katja. I dreamed someone was getting married, a thin blonde white woman, she was in a stunning, cinched dress, material clinging and then cascading, her hair up in long tight ringlets, she was frustrated with how tight they still were, she wanted them to loosen, she bounded up to the window, the mirror, she bounded up and then kept flipping her head over and back up, over and back up, then she would shake her head in the mirror, she wanted the curls to come loose, not look so tight and obvious. All the women around her wanted to help, but she was a whirlwind of energy all alone in the middle. There was more to the dream. Sarah wanted the dog to come sit with her — mom was there, too. We were all staying someplace, like guests at a hotel or a rented house or someplace not our home.
I dreamed of a gathering of transfolks, like a community center sort of meeting, and Fresh and I were rushing through for something, we stopped to get water, during the meeting, and maybe Fresh had to check in with someone, and I was alone, the only cis person with there I think, during the drop in casual support space, and I was talking about how going to wedding is so frustrating because it’s broken down, split into genders, just 2, and I wanted that to change, to open.
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far away from where we started
Good damn morning, San Rafael – thank you for the incredibly loud noise, the jackhammering, the slamming doors. Now, yes, I get it: wake up early, Jen, and you will be able to focus before all this starts.
My sister and her sweetie are here and we were up talking until 1:30, about relationships and friends, about addiction and getting help of all kinds and more. I set my alarm for 6:30, hopefully, but of course completely ignored it. And had dreams that were sort of about crime again, about being a part of a crew who were escaping, or helping a group of folks escape. Or maybe I was pat of the group that was gathering to bring those folks back in, but they were friends of mine, the folks who had escaped, maybe I was sort of a traitor but they didn’t know. At the end of the dream, I’m trying to dance up the stairs like/with a teenage boy who’s just sort of learning to pose and preen, and he and I are posewalking. We’re strutting up the stairs to The Miami Sound Machine’s “Do the Conga.” I can’t really dance, can’t make my body do what it feels, it’s like I’m constricted. Which frustrates me because I really start feeling the music, or maybe what I start feeling is the dancing. There was stuff in the dream about getting taken in, caught – somehow I knew that the authorities were coming, and I was a part of the group getting caught. We some of us went and folded down when the authorities came. Is that right? The one authority person who came in first was a tall lanky dyke, and our friend gave herself up, she went and bent down for her, and when she bent over her dress fell over her body, and she was skinner than toothpicks, she had no fat anywhere and hardly any muscle, she was barely sticks, emaciated, starved, gone.
Last night I was looking at my sister while she talked and she sounded like she always has, like my little sister. As though her voice hasn’t changed since we were small. It’s her forever voice, the one that lives in my body, and I get to have that pleasure because I was already here when she was born, and so I have known her voice since it came to be in the breathing world. So there’s this sense that we’re still small, we’re still young, we still have time – and then I look at her face, and see these small crinkles around her eyes. This isn’t about calling out age: this is about realizing that small girls don’t have those particular crinkles. Those are a woman’s crinkles. We are aging. I thought, we’re running out of time. What if we don’t make it before….?
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Writing the Flood begins this Saturday, 6/19!
Just a reminder — this new, monthly Saturday afternoon writing space commences this coming Saturday, 6/19! This new group is in direct response to the folks who’ve been wanting a general-topic writing space — read on for more info, and then visit our Contact page to reserve a space!
Writing the Flood
Open the gates and let your writing voice flow
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