Just a quick note — these posts might be a bit erratic/brief over the next couple weeks, as I get down to the wire for GRE prep. Yowza. Keep your fingers and toes crossed for me, ok?
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Also, this weekend brings this month’s Writing the Flood session — registration is just about full, but there are still a couple spaces left. Will you be able to join us?
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This weekend I went out to Alamo, CA to assist with the AWA Facilitator/Leadership Training — it was my first time acting as an assistant trainer, and I’m so grateful to have been able to be there. I got to work with 13 women (11 trainees plus two amazing trainers, Jan Haag and Mary Tuchscherer, both of whom I feel so lucky to have trained with!). I want to tell you about the vision, the passion, each of these 13 women carry for the power of words, the power of language and writing to transform and open. I got to spend about an hour on Friday night, talking about my roots in this work, pontificating about why I think this work is so important, why this method works so well for survivors of sexual trauma and folks who want to write about sex, for anyone who wants to tell difficult, intimate, tender stories. I can start to proselytize — thank goodness we moved into an erotic writing exercise.
Here’s what I wrote, using this line from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Two Countries“: “Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.” It was a short write, just five minutes.
Skin had hope — cunts have hope. They’re just part of these portable bodies, aren’t they, just small gloves, slippery encapsulants, contained amongst themselves, they are our blood and flesh of hope, they are our most resilient hagiographies — they write us throbbing, they wake us into possibility each time they press us open, even with nobody else’s help — sometimes with the wrong somebody else’s help. They don’t know the nature of the pressure, who’s behind that finger, that breath on the neck, that knee between thighs;
Cunts are our ever-present resiliency. They keep on waking — it’s what they know, isn’t it, their one recursive, incipient thought, this inchoate hope that doesn’t have to have a glove to flow into but that shines like morning in us even when we’re aching and ashamed: cunts hold hope for us — that’s their lovely, lonely job.
thanks for your work, your words, your love in this world.
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