Tag Archives: write whole

what we attend to shapes us

Labyrinth Habitat mural by Johanna Poehig;  I wake up from layered and complicated dreams. There are things I want to tell you about, but it’s not time for them yet. The alarm goes off at 4, and I think, I could just snooze for a little bit, and then I forget to press snooze, and now it’s after 5.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

The Fall writing workshop series begins next week — Write Whole: Survivors Write starts on Monday, and we do still have a couple of spaces left! Friday is the last day to register — if you have been thinking about joining us and giving yourself and your stories a regular, weekly writing time, please do contact me.

Continue reading

Fall 2011 workshop schedule!

graffiti of a pink-purple pencil standing up next to a doorwayHello writers & writers-to-be!

We’ve got a few workshops coming up this month and next around Writing Ourselves Whole, and I’d love to write with you!

  • September 17: Writing the Flood
  • September 28: Erotic Reading Circle
  • Beginning October 3: Write Whole: Survivors Write: 8 Monday evenings, 6-8:30. Open to all women who are survivors of sexual trauma
    Registration is open — Please sign up early, and avoid that late-registration fee!
  • October 15: LitQuake’s LitCrawl! I get to participate in Carol Queen’s Good Vibrations reading again this year, during Phase 2 of the LitCrawl (7:15-8:15)
  • November 12: Reclaiming our Erotic Story (Sacramento)a daylong writing workshop (10am-5pm); open to writers of all genders and all sexual orientations!
  • November 13: Write Whole: Survivors Write (Sacramento)a daylong writing workshop (10am-5pm); open to survivors of all genders

Continue reading

what matters most

graffiti -- tampon with angel wings and a haloGood morning, grey & rainy — happy Summer-in-the-Bay-Area. It looks like a good day to get some inside work done, like maybe book proposals.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

One of the things I love about being closer to San Francisco now is being able to get 89.5 KPOO on the radio again. Tuesday mornings with JJ on the Radio & old-school soul music makes me feel like I’m home, reminds me of being in my little studio back near the Panhandle, the first apartment I ever lived in on my own, trying to figure out who I was going to be… (Please note: I’m still trying to figure out who I’m going to be — )

Continue reading

enter the mess

graffiti: summer hat, pink & yellow with a blue ribbon & flowerWe try things and try things, we find out what works for this moment, this timeframe, and then when it stops working, we try something else. Sometimes we spin for awhile, trying to figure out what changed: why isn’t it working anymore? But eventually –don’t we?– we relent, and let the change in.

Good Tuesday morning! This morning, Sophie and I walked down to the water, we saw a great blue heron drifting overhead, and she saw her first calling seagull, lifted her ears to the sound, got distracted then by the thud of the small bay waves hitting the seawall. As of last Saturday, she’s been with us a month. What changes we’ve all been through — and here’s this new life that’s pushed her warm face into both our hearts.

Today’s the first official day of summer, summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere — how are you going to mark this day?

Continue reading

a relationship with home again


Yesterday we hiked up a mountain — a small mountain, Tiburon mountain, sure, but when we came to the top, we could see the full body of that orange Golden Gate Bridge, hugged thick by fog, nearly weighted down. We could see the whole fog-heavy morning laid out in front of us.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

This week, the workshops begin again — tonight I’ll be meeting with a full Write Whole workshop, and throughout the day, I’ll be communicating with folks who’ve signed up for the online Reclaiming Our Erotic Story class. I’m making my first videos ever for the online workshop — I feel like we get closer to the ‘in person’ experience if folks can hear the prompt, rather than read it. We’ll see how that goes.

Continue reading

friendluv & friendjealousy

stencil graffiti: your existence gives me hopeGood morning!

Listen, have you seen the movie Bridesmaids yet? Will you go see it, so that we can talk about it here?

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

Continue reading

Write Whole and Declaring Our Erotic – 8 week workshops begin mid-June!

I’ve got the summer 8-week workshop schedule up, finally —

~Write Whole: Survivors Write
8 Monday evenings, 6:00-8:30pm, beginning 6/13
Open to all women survivors of sexual trauma
(Workshop held in downtown San Francisco)

o In the *Write Whole: Survivors Write* workshop, you’ll gather with other survivors of sexual trauma to create new art and new beauty out of life’s difficult and complicated realities. Learn to trust the flow of your own writing, and receive immediate feedback about the power of your words! Remember: we’re open to ALL women, and ‘survivor’ is self-defined!

Continue reading

Upcoming workshops, SEAF & more!

sticker graffiti -- a woman squated down, in stockings, bra and wig, holding a frame around herself

found this image right after tour and thought, "Yup -- that's some femme energy right there."

Good morning, all!

Whew, the pollen has got me this year — are your allergies blowing up? I can’t remember the last time I had such a strong reaction, and yet all I can do when I pass by the new flowers, the electric new green leaves, the eucalyptus trees in full yellow polleny bloom, is to stick my face right in and grin.  I’m trying some homeopathic remedies before I go get the Claratin — bought some local honey, which will introduce my immune system to the local pollens in a gentler way, and let my body begin to build up a familiarity (which I rather thought it already had, but I think I was wrong!); we’ll see how that helps!

Continue reading

maybe I’ll do something with it when I get up

Albequerque graffiti of a tree with a pink and white, bent nearly to the ground Good morning! Whew, it’s been a minute since I’ve been here during my morning writing time — for the past several years, when the dark comes in Nov-Dec, I get very quiet and hibernate-y; all I want to do is be warm and comfortable and quiet. Slowly, the Mr. and I are creating warm spaces in a house that hasn’t been kept warm for a long time, it seems. Lots of baking sweet potatoes helps warm a house. Quiet, thrummy music. Candles help, too. And space heaters, thermal curtains. Rugs, too, once they come our way.

The other thing that happens during this time is that I’m less pulled to put words out — there are moments when I get tired of words. Does this happen to you? Words are among my favorite and least favorite things, and there are times when I am overwhelmed by their limitations, how very much language can’t do. Sometimes I need to put it down, rest both of us, me and words, forgive us for what we can’t communicate exactly right, or at all.

If I had more time this morning, I’d share more with you about this, which is kind of paradoxical, I guess. The Fall Writing Ourselves Whole workshops have finished — Write Whole ended before I went away to New Mexico, and Declaring Our Erotic ended just last week; both groups made up of strong writers who were ready and willing to go deep. I continue to be grateful. At some point, I’ll be able to write about how bits of each writer’s work (I mean, each of the several hundred folks I’ve written with over the last many years) will linger with me, become part of the literature of this life: what an extraordinary gift.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading