A facilitator’s gratitude

This week is the last meeting of this Spring’s Write Whole (survivors) and Declaring Our Erotic workshops — and this is the second write I did last night with my DOE writers, how grateful I am to get to do this work:

Write #2, 6/24/08:

All I can think of is the time we first gathered around this fire and snuck our way through the worry and possibility into new words and voices, when we strung ourselves out onto tightropes of fear and walked straight into an empty rent-by-the-hour room in the new gay center downtown and we sat our chairs in a circle and hadn’t yet spilled our lust all over and down the fronts of our shirts for everyone else to see. We were risking more than we were aware of in that moment, when we pulled a pen out of our back pockets or dug one out of our bags or snuck one off the table and we set it to the blank page and we said, “This is what I think erotic writing can do.” All I can think of is the time I first sat in the circle of erotic word makers and then we lifted our pens up off the page after 7 minutes of scratching and scrawling, just 7 minutes and the whole world was changed because these folks and hope enough to write an answer down and then joy and brazen careening flying-fuck kind of optimism enough to open their mouths and let those same scrawled words come pushing up through ht heart and lungs, formed by lips and teeth,into our right now hearing. And in the aftermath, I said “What stayed?” and then and then and then – people risked answering – cause the saying what stays, what you remember, is a risk, too, and the shared gifts in that room were tangible and effervescent, innumerable and yet I tried to write them all down and there’s nothing hot about this writing / not really / except I still get caught in that joy the way that we honor one another’s craftsmanship and craftwomanselves, one another’s optimism and grief, one another’s hotness and brilliance and yes we are forever these writers right now and in the process of exactly this writing we change and it’s exactly that inoculation against stagnation that brings me back here how it’s always already new and surprising how it seems like I know what’s going to happen but really I just have a vague sense of a potential starting point and some grapes and crackers to snack on and then we fly and we fly into the words, we jump and groan into the flames, we lift our hands back up, sticky and sweaty, and we get to show of yes what magic we’ve done.

thanks, y’all. thanks for reading, and thanks for writing!