Tag Archives: sexual trauma

not apples and oranges, but apples and apples

graffiti: text reads, Oh, good morning. It’s a Monday again. How did the weekend treat you? Were you kind to yourself? Did you make some room for your words?

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Don’t forget about the Writing Ourselves Whole book launch party next Tuesday, December 5! (Click for more deets or to RSVP!)

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Fearless Words: A free writing workshop for women survivors (with SFWAR!)

San Francisco Women Against Rape is offering our Fearless Words Creative Writing Workshop for women survivors of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and child sexual abuse. Group begins August 28. Eight Wednesdays, 6-8pm at The Women’s Building San Francisco (18th and Valencia). Woman-identified writers of all levels are invited to attend this workshop, created especially for survivors of sexual violence to discover our voices, create political dialogue and develop our craft as writers, while using writing as a medium of healing and transformation. Facilitated by Jen Cross, this group is free, wheelchair accessible, and runs 8 weeks. Call Tabitha at 415/861-2024 for a short intake interview or for more information. Thank you!

what if we lived

graffiti: silhouette of a child walking a dog - behind them are enormous bright flowers(some maybe-intense writing about incest this morning — not details of a story, but thinking about how we think about ourselves, the language we use to describe ourselves. In any event, please take care of you — xo, Jen)

Today’s tea is tulsi-anise-nettle-mint. I choose tulsi for the calming, anise for the thick, round taste and the belly comforting, nettle for the cleansing and the bitterness, mint for the sweetness, the quickening sharpness. And, for the first time since moving, the first time this year, likely, I have the window open while I write. 2 candles, the tea-smoke pushing into the light of the flames, and some cool breeze from outside that feels like a good morning.

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all of our body can hold different parts of our stories

graffiti, wheat pasted maybe, of a young male deer beneath a green treeI got up extra early today to do my morning pages, before coming to the computer.  Maybe it will have been a good idea, but right now I’m tired and would like more sleep. Yesterday was a very quiet day — perfect. No time on the computer — 2 old movies (a Doris Day & a Katherine Hepburn) and 1 more recent, Hook. A day for baking, for reading in the sun, for cafe writing.

Two nights ago, when we got home from dinner with Alex after Body Empathy, there were at least two deer nested down back beneath the big tree directly in front of the carport. We tiptoed out of the car, lugging bags of stuff, materials, workshop business and food, and said hello to them and told them how pretty they were. They kept their eyes on us, ears up, watching, but didn’t move. The bigger one didn’t move, the mama maybe — the smaller, behind, she’d stood by the time we were done unloading. Yesterday afternoon I wandered back to where they’d been, wanted to see the outlines of bellies on the ground, in a pile of leaves maybe, but all I saw were the small hoofprints all around the back area where the giant pile of leaves used to be. Maybe they were snacking on new blackberry cane growth, or maybe there was something good in the neighbor’s compost pile. I knew they might come up to the house and push their heads to the tomato plant I’ve got that’s going crazy now, suddenly flowering and budding, growing tall and almost wild — I knew they might come up and get a taste, since F! has seen their footprints in my lettuce pots behind the fence! It’s ok, though. They can have some and can leave me some. I’ve heard their feet clacking on the sidewalk, those dark hooves striking sharp and simple, like it’s a normal sound, deerhooves in my ears. They won me over.

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Coming up! Body Empathy on Sat, November 13

(Please help us pass the word!)

First Congregational Church of Oakland

2501 Harrison St.

Oakland, CA

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light through the layers of his lies

woman in a gas mask, naked, lying flat and looking out at the viewerNote: 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

white spray-painted heart on red background, painted on Mass Ave sidewalk in BostonGood 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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DOE: the right to be honest

painting, "From Strength to Liberty" -- figures entwined, reaching, pushing, stretching, dancing

"From Strength to Liberty," by Javier Azurdia -- click on the image above to see more of his gorgeous work.

I started to type in my motto as the title of this post, but only got as far as “lobertis…” and I had to stop and delete it all and drink more tea. Still fighting off, battling (dang it — the military metaphors are all over us!), wrangling with this cold, but I think I’m on the backside now. Got some great healing advice over on facebook — thank you! I’ve had lots of tea and veggies and rice and miso broth. I’ve got these soups I make when I’m sick that always just look awful when the sick is gone — but they do the job!

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someone who can see what I mean

graffiti: child reading a book

read read read...

It’s Monday and I am thinking of things to write about — I just did my three pages, and that feels good, a kind of stretching. But what now? I thought about writing about my ideal reader: who is that?

The candle is at my right eye now, the lights are strangling my attention: incandescent on the left, candleflame on the right.

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pay attention to all the different facets that truth has

crying is ok here - graffitiI’m afraid to start writing again this morning. There’s this fragile peace within me, something inside that’s just barely standing on its own two feet, and I don’t want to shatter it or shake it up or push it back over.

I didn’t blog last Friday — I got up, overwhelmed and sad, and didn’t have any words to meet me once I sat down at the page. That happens sometimes, and often I write through it anyway. What am I doing here, I type — why aren’t I asleep, I could be in bed, what’s the point of this? Then I get tired of that sort of writing and I move into something else, something more interesting. On Friday, I couldn’t get to something more interesting. Everything fell away from what words could do for me. I hate that place. So instead I went online, I read my email, something I try never to do before doing my writing, because it’s always easier to read than to write, at least for me.

There’s a mailing list I’m on, STAT (Society for Treating Abuse Today), for survivors of extreme and ritual abuse and also for therapists who work with survivors of such abuse. Someone had posted a link to the Franklin Scandal. I followed the link, and found myself reading excerpts from a book about a man, Larry King (not the television star). Larry King ran a credit union, where kids from Boys Town worked. There was a contract between Boys Town and Franklin Credit Union. Larry King also flew kids from Boys Town to Washington DC, where the kids had to have sex with/get raped by prominent public officials, at sex “parties.” This went on in the 80s, and I don’t want to go back to the page again to get all the details — I don’t want to get sucked in again. He provided kids for the parties, and also a photographer — he wanted to get pictures of these politicians that could be used for blackmail. In this scenario, the kids were stage makeup for a higher game — political jockeying between/among adults. These kids were pawns, tools, utensils in a bigger game. Their individual humanity didn’t matter — what mattered was getting a photo of this particular individual, this career politician, this power broker, having sex with some kid. Any kid. The humanity of the kid doesn’t matter to the adults running the game.

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