what resilience and growth look like

femme conference 2010 -- logo and dates! August 20-22 in OaklandGood morning!  Today is Friday and according to my post schedule-thinking that I did earlier this week, I should/could be talking about writing ourselves whole in general, as a business. WOW-biz or something. It’s going to be a quick post this morning, ’cause I’ve got to get in the shower and get ready for FemmeCon, though, so here’s what I want to say about the business of running a business — I can’t believe that it’s something I’m doing.

For many (many) years, my main work-related goal was to have the easiest possible taxes; my only goal was to be able to file a, what’s that called, an EZ form every April, or to not have to even file the form because I didn’t have anything new or interesting to tell the government about my financial situation.  Now I’ve got this thing that I’m doing for love and for part of my livelihood, and I’m working toward having it be all of my livelihood, this writing, workshopping and talking about all of it.

I’ve been in the midst of this organic growing process (or not growing so much, often), and this year I’ve taken a number of major leaps toward having writing ourselves whole be all of what I do with my work life/time: first, applying to Intersection for the Arts’ Incubator project — as a part of the Intersection Incubator, I get to be fiscally sponsored, which means I’m sort of in this excellent inbetween land of nonprofit and not, where I can have access to grants only available to nonprofits and can accept tax-deductible donations, and also continue to do other social entrepreneurial work, grassroots work — that is, not be tied to the nonprofit model. I’m grateful to Intersection for the opportunity to participate in this amazing program, and also to my friend and colleague and role model, Peggy Simmons of Green Windows Writing Groups as well, who investigated and participated in Intersection’s Incubator program first, and shares continually of her wisdom, her learning, her ideas.

The second thing that’s happening right now is that I’m asking for help. It’s not that I haven’t had a lot of help over the last eight years with these workshops — from workshop participants and friends and colleagues passing the word about the workshops, folks offering space to hold workshops in, making donations, coming out and helping to publicize fundraising events, sharing prompt ideas, and so much more. What’s happening now is a little bit different: I’ve hopped off the “I’m doing this all by myself” train. As I begin to work with Lou Vaile and with Jianda Monique (of SugarMama PR!), and possibly others too (!), I will have grown writing ourselves whole out past the bounds of my own, individual capacity — it’s going to be at a place where I can no longer return to doing all the work myself. (Note that I haven’t been doing all the work myself for awhile — My Mr. helps so much, even when I’m weird about it, and then there’s so much that’s just not getting done.) So that’s exciting and terrifying and I can’t wait and I also want to, a little part of me wants to, just go back to 8 years ago when there was just one workshop and I was just getting started and that’s all I was doing.  But that’s not the way the work works — humans grow and like to expand and learn. Here we go!

What else do I want to tell you?  Today I’m doing a workshop at FemmeCon for femme survivors called Wild Geese  — yep, after the poem by Mary Oliver. One of the things I hope we’ll get to explore is this intersection of identities: femininity (however we wear/live it) and survivor (however that rings true for us).  For me, these identities inflect each other powerfully, and an enormous part of my struggle with returning to/reclaiming a ‘girl’ identity was the fact that, for me, ‘girl’ was entirely born up with victim, vulnerable, powerless. My girl identity and my girl body (and I love that I think of  Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha‘s amazing piece, “gonna get my girl body back” in Brazen Femme, everytime I think the phrase ‘girl body’ now) has everything to do with my trauma, and so I didn’t want this girl body, and stepped into a butch-boy body for nearly a decade.  Not everyone, of course, takes the same path–today, together, we’ll get to think about how these pieces shape and influence each other, all the different ways femme resilience looks like.

And then Saturday’s the August Writing the Flood workshop — can’t wait for that one!  I’ve got new exercise ideas (thanks again to Peggy and others) and poems and and — will I get to write with you?

What’s resilience and growth look like for you today?  I’d love to know what you’re thinking about that —

Thank you so much for being there, for reading and for writing —

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