Good grey morning to you. Outside, the sky is clouded with mist and the daffodils have begun to show their yellow faces. I wonder if I will ever get used to California. Where I’m from, February, late winter, is the time of near despair: when will it ever end? It’s the time of seed catalogs and beginning to dream of spring. Punxsutawney Phil had some real news to deliver — please, please say it’s going to be an early spring, Mr. Groundhog. I don’t know how much more of this cold I can stand. But here out west, the bulbs start shooting up in January, and as the light begins to change, it feels like spring already even in these early months. How does the body learn to acclimate to a new way of being?
There’s quite a bit going on around here: Body Heat, Fierce Hunger, and a whole lot of workshops!The Body Heat Femme Porn Tour kicks off its 2013 West Coast tour this Friday at the Center for Sex and Culture (7:30 show, special guest Shar Rednour!) and I’m again producing a new chapbook of work created and performed over the last year to offer for sale during tour. Given the focus of much last year’s writing on radical self love and embodiment, I’m entitling the book “Notorious” (and also hope to have “notorious masturbator” stickers for sale).
Also, we’re (we meaning Renee, Program Assistant Extraordinaire, and myself) are working hard to organize Fierce Hunger, a benefit to celebrate 10 years of Writing Ourselves Whole! This event will include a silent auction and time for writers and the extended Writing Ourselves Whole community to mingle and dance to the offerings of DJs Zanne and Junkyard — then a reading (and you know how our readings are), displaying the variety of our writers’ responses to what we are fiercely hungry for. After we revel in our words, then we dance into the night! Please come, eat, dance, enjoy– let us celebrate you. The suggested donation is $20, and we invite all who come to pay what they can — all donations, all proceeds raised, will go to our survivors workshop scholarship fund (and all donations are tax-deductible, remember). We’re producing special chapbook produced for this event, too: fierce and hungry writings from these first ten years of Writing Ourselves Whole.
What else? The workshops are flying (Write Whole, Dive Deep, Writing the Flood) — I’ve got a couple of workshops to facilitate on tour, which I love doing, and then to go back to Sacramento on March 9 for another day of liberatory erotic writing. After many requests, the online writing workshops kick off on April 8 (our first offering is open to queer survivors of trauma). In April, I get to go back to Evergreen State College for an afternoon of survivors writing during their annual Sexual Assault Awareness Month events.
It’s gonna be quite a spring. I’ll take all the daffodils I can find. Come out and say hello sometime, ok? Maybe at a show or a workshop (in person or online), here or over on Facebook — it’s so good to be connected with you.
What words does Spring bring for you? Can you take ten minutes today or this week and be with the quality of light that means Spring for you, or the way the air smells, or what sounds began to rise in the air that tell you it’s spring? If it doesn’t feel like spring where you are, this is a good time for fiction, or memoir, or fantasy.
I’m grateful for you today. Thanks for your presence, your support these ten years, your reading and sharing, and for your good good good words!
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