unpetalling — and erotic writing workshops coming up

graffiti of a rose, with a heart at the center, black paint on concretegood morning good morning. I haven’t offered a tea report for awhile here — this morning’s tea is wulong with mint and nettle, and some crushed anise and cardamon seed. Thanks to my sister and her sweetheart for the wulong — I’ve been doing a bit more caffeine lately, drinking more black and a lot more green tea. This morning my heart is pounding, but I don’t think that’s the aftermath of alchemical buzz. It’s something different.

What do you do on the mornings you can’t remember your dreams, but you know you had them? Meditation would be ideal, I think, wouldn’t it?

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A quick reminder about what’s coming up (apparently it’s all erotic all the time around here, at least according to this update):

Tonight! 1/25 — the Erotic Reading Circle! Join Carol Queen and me for the first Reading Circle of 2012. Bring stories/writing to share, or just be a part of the circle of listeners. 7:30pm, Center for Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission St, San Francisco. $5 (suggested donation, no one turned away)

Saturday, 1/28 — Perverts Put Out! I get to perform along with a whole list of amazingness: Sherilyn Connelly, Daphne Gottleib, Philip Huang, Juba Kalamka, Kirk Read, Thomas Roche, and horehound stillpoint. Jan 28, 7:30 pm, Center for Sex and Culture, $10-15. Come on out and warm up your January.

Saturday, 2/4 — Declaring Our Erotic! Join us for the first meeting of our new monthly writing retreats. Each month, come together with a fun, powerful, and supportive group of writers to dive into some sexy and surprising new writing! We will work with a theme every month (February’s is New Beginnings), and you will be invited to write into the ideas that theme inspires in you, or you are welcome to use the workshop retreat time to do whatever writing is most pressing for you. Connect with fierce writing community and offer yourself into your own erotic voice. Spaces are still open!

1/30-2/29 — I’m also leading an online erotic writing intensive with the Transformative Language Arts Network, Claiming Our Erotic Story. Discover the liberatory uses of erotic writing as you try your hand at some explicit erotic writing, and, in so doing, get more comfortable exploring and talking about sexual desires, explore the varied and complex aspects of sexuality and desire, and celebrate the fullness of our erotic expression! Register with the TLAN — I’m looking forward to writing with you!

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That’s right, now I remember: I dreamed I was with a group of writers (maybe for a workshop) at a bookstore, and I pulled a book off the shelf and said, oh, look, they have my book! It was a book about writing, with exercises, etc. And then I looked again at the cover and it wasn’t mine. In fact, I didn’t have a book. This was someone else’s book that I often mistook for one I had written, or felt that I could/should have written.

Some needling for me in that remembering — yowza.

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A poem prompt today. (Thanks to my friend E., who introduced me to the book of poems called Risk Everything, where this was inside). Let yourself read the poem a time or two, and notice what lines call to your writing self, what associations or images arise in you as you read. Give yourself 10 minutes, and just write.

I Unpetalled You
Juan Ramon Jimenez,
translated Stephen Mitchell

I unpetalled you, like a rose,
to see your soul,
and I didn’t see it.
But everything around
— horizons of land and of seas –,
everything, out to the infinite,
was filled with a fragrance,
enormous and alive.

Thank you for all the ways you unpetal, the ways you risk, the ways you offer your brilliance and fragrance to the world. Thank you for your words.

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