Writing Ourselves Whole

"Real" Butch

2009-06-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

(This is a part of a longer, ongoing work in progress about this transition from feminine straight girl to butch dyke to femme…)

I’ve been defending you a lot recently in ways I never would have back when I was you. You never used the term Real Butch, hated that essentializing, that narrowing of focus, that erasure of all the other queer possibilities of the masculine gendering the female flesh. Nowadays, now and again, I tell the ones who ask me, OK, yeah, I was a Real Butch.

They can’t hear the “but…” but you do, I know it, I can feel you peeling behind my teeth, wanting to push out the whole story, wanting me to keep on telling it like it was—and is—how there’s no such goddamn thing as a real butch and butch is as ze says it is, whoever’s wearing the skin on that body, but we both know that’s always in question, right?

The truth is I’m still grateful to you for the ways you made me know I could be safe in the world and although just recently we, you and me, got told that we had a privileged coming out because there was the semblance of a community at school when I put 2 and 2 together and got gay and because I came out into a place where gayness was relatively acceptable—we both remember that there was not much safe about my life then and your hands had had to go places they were never meant to visit and you carried all the heavy boxes of our terror and you opened the doors for our future possibility – all the things, yes, that a goddamn real butch is supposed to do. You found a way to fit this me, now, into your curvature and flank, into your faggy footwork on the dance floor under the smoke machine’s smog and the one starry sad set of flashing red green and gold lights at the local bar.

And here’s what I want you to know now: I’m sorry we didn’t make it out any deeper before my plumage and finery found its way back out again, before the girl was made possible again and you had to slide that fine black leather motorcycle jacket off your shoulders for the last time – it just doesn’t fit now; I’d wear it for you if it could. But I mean, I’m sorry that we never found those bars, those old smoky hinges of solidarity where you could have shaped and strapped the hard gear of your masculine future, where you could have butted heads with other women willing to ride the hard truth of this existence; goddamnit, I mean I’m sorry you never got to be a real butch with other real butches, be looked upon as something or someone right not just novel or different or brave or odd or whatever. Not as just a shield, but as a real self.

I want you to know I believed in you and needed you in those years, and, of course, it’s not like I can’t feel how you shaped my walk, or how you get me in trouble still, assuming I can make eye contact with anyone on the street and have it be the right safe thing to do.

Here’s what I mean to say – that there’s never anything false about us when one identity shifts and slides into another. We both know that girl wasn’t a safe place to be all those years and you stepped up like a butch does and you made a handful of things a little safer. I know I’m not supposed to say these things: we spent so much time pulling up the roots of our history to find the nascent butch inside and just look, just look where we are now—

2009-06-23T09:33:00.001-07:00

Don't forget! June ERC is TOMORROW, 6/24, 7:30, at the CSC! Bring those stories of your, ahem, liberation: http://ping.fm/kAUAM

We are family?

2009-06-19T12:59:00.000-07:00

Thursday night at the phenomenal Girl Talk: A Cis & Trans Woman Dialogue, curated by Julia Serano and Gina de Vries, Ryka Aoki de la Cruz talked about family, about how if we're family how can we 'outreach' to each other? Families who've been separated have reunions, not outreach -- it was brilliant (as were each of the other performances shared at that show) and of course there were many more points she made and images she shared in her piece...

And this one, though, sticks in me -- sticks in my troubles -- the way performers talk about family sometimes, how we should treat each other more like family, meaning we should treat each other better, more kindly, with more open hearts, right? I guess that's how my inside hopeful heartsick places interpret that phrase.

But I think we do treat each other like family, already, unfortunately. 'Cause what are our experiences of family? We drop one another when it's expedient, we shut each other out and off. We take sexual advantage and then turn our backs. Isn't that family?

I get tired (and by tired I mean heartbroken-sad) of hearing about family like it should be understandable, like by referencing family as a metaphor for unconditional-yet-complicated love and acceptance, I will understand what that means. But I don't. My history of family is retracted love, pure and unabashed abandonment, extremely painful attempts at reconnection across severed ties -- and now we're supposed to make family together, you and me, we in these queer communities, and family, to me, looks like the horrifying inbred, yes, incestuous (and I use that metaphor deliberately) difficult raw puritanical stuff we have created and find ourselves struggling against.

'Cause I understand what she's talking about (how we don't outreach to family -- so how are you going to talk about 'outreaching' to queer folks of color, for example, to transwomen, to the others who are 'underrepresented' at the mainstream white queer gatherings that many of us find ourselves participating in), and I love it with all the inside webs of my heart.

But/And, also -- we need a different word.

I understand about needing replacements, about using and reclaiming 'family' to mean queer sisterbrothers and brothersisters, but we bring with that word all the baggage that shaped us crooked and raw and bent and ashamed and scarred. We carry into that word, and this new collection of people we're trying to connect with, all the pain that that word learned to bear, all the while we were learning to keep ourselves alive within its bounds, until it was gone.

How do we make 'family' good? How can we engender that word into something worthwhile, settle into it with a sense of hope instead of trepidation? You say we are family -- to me that means there is no hope between us, no common language, a warped tongue, an indelible severing. That's where I grow out of.

Not outreach but reunion. Maybe this truth of family is the way of all of us, and reunion will be painful alongside possible, as much as when I return to my blood family and see the shapes that crafted me and feel cup around my face each pair of arms and every set of hands that released me into the grip of a monster. Is that how we feel each other -- that we sisters and brothers and others haven't stood up for each other enough, haven't protected each other enough, haven't sent enough letters or enough I Miss You cards, or called enough to hear how your life is, to hear how he blessedness flows and hear how the hurts hit you and how can I share in both?

I don't do those parts very well, I'll admit it, the reaching out. She says we don't outreach to family, and I get her meaning, and and and -- I always feel like it's an outreach when I try to touch anyone with a tie to my insides: old friends, blood family -- a tentative feeling those lines: Are we still connected? Have you dropped me yet?

More and more thinking on this to come ... so many thanks to you, Ryka, for these considerations, this possibility, your words!

raw and possible

2009-06-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

061509

Initially I see these two wiry bony consecrated hands, sharp-tipped and skinny, long fingers with severely, gorgeously articulated joints, reaching down into a throat, through mouth, beyond lips and teeth and tongue, past the epiglottis, I think, past uvula and gag reflex and there is no hope of vomiting because this is going down. I see them inside, the two hands, the fingers catching hold of a wizened greenish-greying mass, this sticky dripping lump, something squeamish, tender, almost furry or corrugated, entirely encapsulated in slime -- something like a hairball or a carcass, the body of an alien life form, but without tendrils or tentacles -- something without hope or fever or mental status.

Something incoherent. Or inchoate. Or both.

The hands pull it out of its lodging the way you yank something nearly rotted and festering out of the disposal chamber in your sink -- gingerly, quick, with steady pressure, hoping your fist will fit on the way back out with you holding to the pile of not yet decomposed foodstuffs mixed with peach bits or bones or a spoon, all of which is tangling up the blades of your disposal -- I mean your throat.

It's become its own colony, this amalgamation: collecting every loop that got slipped around your neck, every swallowed I said no thank you, every murmured Please stop , every unspoken I wish you would, every clenched teeth mumbled Jesus Christ will you just get the fuck away from me, every Gosh I don't know that issued from between your lips instead of the facts that gathered boom like metal to magnet on the other side of the gathering storm in your throat. Numbers, equations, dates, names, places, hopes, longings, dreams: all tangled together, knotted and nearly putrid but not quite just like the compost can be. You know it's all good stuff in there, even if it has been left all on its own to fester and decompose

The fingers begin to pick and pull at the mass, brushing away green slime saliva and more caught for so many years, what got washed down your gullet -- and your throat is bone sore, stretched and aching, wheezing empty with sound cavernous, open, raw and possible

wearing nothing but my words

2009-06-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

061609

I met her at the door wearing nothing: wearing, I guess I should say, nothing but my words.

The night before I had taken myself out again, finally, to the fancy art supply store in mid-town, the one covered in wacky paint smatterings, asymmetrical sculpture spelling out its name, a forefront of allegiance to the madcap struggling artist but that solidarity ended once the starving reached the store's front doors -- the prices were so high that it was difficult to imagine anyone I knew (all folks trying to stretch ends to meeting) actually being able to afford anything in there.

It was my favorite porn shop.

I'd visit with some guilty regularity, smoothing my hand across the ragged faces of hand-made papers hanging from the rafters and the silk onionskins, pale and aching for a pen's wet tip to stroke its surface. Then I'd linger, loiter really, in front of all the pens: the multihued variety, the different tips, the fat permanents, the sharp faint fade-able colored pencils, and more and more.

The cute butch thing who worked behind the counter tried to make eyes at me when I came embarassedly sidling in (cuz what if one of my friends saw me in the bougie joint? they'd think I was hiding a trust fund for sure), but I walked fast past her every time, cheeks flushed, hands clasped together at my front on the days I was in poka-dotted tulle skirts, or shoved deep in my pockets when I'd donned the tweed trousers.

She finally figured out the best way (the only way) to get my attention, and started holding back recently-arrived writing merchandise behind her cashier station. She had a vibrating Hello Kitty pen the first day (ballpoint, though, hardly wrote at all, and she shot the half-grin from her face when I handed it back without a single salacious innuendo) and, the next time it was a real Javanese green peacock quill that got dipped into fine ink -- but the third, the final, was when she set some of that onionskin out for me, and handed me a just-filled fine-bone fountain pen, and I set it to the page and began to write. The ink flowed like my own thoughts were being exactly gentled directly from brain through blood to words.

My cunt ached a little then, the snap of a throb, and I had to set the pen down and ask her where the bathroom was. She pointed, one eyebrow raised, didn't follow me. After a few minutes of ministration, I let myself out the shop's back door, to avoid any inquiries about my flushed face.

So the day I finally got a check from the freelance gig I'd finished several months prior, complete with a bonus for the work finished early (go figure), I knew just what I had to go back for -- and what I was going to do with it upon acquisition.

the physicality of it

2009-06-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

060209

This is what I love about writing: the physicality of it and the mess, the rush of words and the trying to keep up with the flood         how I got a new pen with fresh ink and so I'm trying to reclaim my wrist         this fat fast smooth ache --

what I love about writing is harnessing what's intangible, impenetrible, the desperation to get inside         fully         the thing that has no words, not really, the truth is writing is a chase, trying to catch the breath of the words, the thought, the fist thing that flashed across behind the tongue of my imaginings before it's snipped away by loss or ego or don't say that or reconstructive tendencies.

What I love is this reaching, teaching myself to breathe, to drink, to eat while I write         keep the wrist aching, move through that burn into the true good stuff, how the words aren't more important than the race, and they are.

what do I want to tell you in 10 minutes

2009-06-18T14:45:00.000-07:00

060109

What do I want to tell you in ten minutes? That I was catapulted into shame-slavery and prosto-destitution is only one strand of this miner's fabric. There's the way I used to cuddle and curl under a yew bush (that still today I spell like "ewe," like mama sheep, and so maybe she was a haven, too, in her funny fur curly like the dark green fronds of the bush)         anyway         how the yew bush grew like a cave up and around space, and I could sweep brush the dirt floor, bring books, shelter myself early from my mother's storms.

Sheltering self in words, which were always a haven, as far back as I can remember, although I don't think I can say they're natural, at least they're clean.

The details and rough sketch outline include three houses in and around middle-Eastern Nebraska by the age of 6, and about four more by the age of 10, and then there was only one even if that one didn't include my father         he had his own home         and it was an hour southwest from The One         down the black ribbon of interstate 80 that cut through dark green cottonwood and oak and tall rushes living the sides of the highway, filled with red-winged blackbirds         cutting across the broad flat damp sandbar of the Platte River and all its attendant mosquitoes and the echoes of sandhill cranes that were never there on the river when we rushed by in Mom's burgundy-red Mercury Monarch or dad's too-dull-bright orange and white-capped Volkswagen Van         that road led back and forth to Dad's house, not grandmother's (over the river and through those woods)         but slowly the road began to disintegrate, disappear         for lack of use         they're still rebuilding every time I go back         more construction, more hope

once we entered The One house the last one there wasn't any room for another         the town was too small for the both of them         and one turned around and let himself out.

2009-06-18T14:41:00.001-07:00

Tomales Bay Workshops this Oct -- looks pretty amazing! http://ping.fm/flHar

Thanks today...

2009-06-09T13:57:00.001-07:00

This morning I'm grateful for the rain-scented just-washed streets of early downtown San Francisco; the quiet resonance in my office after two nights in a row of deep, engaged, risky writing; the view of both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate bridge from the BART windows as we approached West Oakland station; the little girl giggling uncontrollably in a packed BART car while she played make-believe hide and seek with her daddy, bringing giggles up to my lips and the lips of other passengers as well, breaking down through some of those early morning pre-caffeinated heading-to-a-day-job-blues sorts of walls...

This is what my story contains

2009-06-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

(A write from last night's workshop -- it's not edited, it's still raw and heart-beaty. And, too, here's a general warning that this piece contains some difficult and graphic material. Be easy with yourselves if you read on.)

This is what my story contains: this wreckage that is all of our wreckage, the fragmentary remembering that is never more than anyone else's remembering but feels like less, necessarily, because of the shroud trauma and loss cast over every indecent obelisk of that reckoning: an ornate crimson tinting, veiling the sharp delineated carve and curvature of breath

the way trauma is constantly whispering in my inside ear, asking Really? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? like static, that haze freezing the smooth flow of my pen as soon as I drop my hand to the page and begin to write -- static, the way a radio tuning goes cloudy sometimes once you remove the antenna your body provides when you pull your hand away and expect the music to keep on flowing smoothly on its own

this metaphor could extend indefinitely, remix with others, entwine, commingle, shadow, stave off -- but what's there is this girl holding a stepfather's balls in her one hand while his tiny, ostensibly purposefully foreshortened cock (he told her and the rest of them that he had learned an ancient Taoist technique of pulling the base of one's penis into the body so as to -- what? -- keep it warm? avoid hurting someone?) shoves rocks pushes in and out of her mouth. The clouds shroud my shoulders as I write the way her mouth clouded, too, eventually, filmy and white, and this was the livingroom couch and she was as worried as he was of getting caught -- getting caught -- by their (did I say their?) -- her mother, his wife, the innkeeper, who was in the kitchen in the bathroom in the office who was keeping to herself after a day of his constant monitoring at the private practice office they shared

the one with the Him on the couch, she's 16 or 17 or 18 or 19 or 20, this could have been any of those ages, I won't risk the static return by venturing to guess which one it was exactly. her limbs might have looked long and coltish and adult and her mouth would taste clotted and congealed and congenitaled and corpulent and contained and this moment lives in nobody's memory of her except his and her own because who can contain this kind of history? The parents and lovers who have heard the stories are longing to be rid of them, to shed their ears of the words as soon as they're spoken, as soon as the breath around each component syllable has cooled and I write because I don't want him to be the one still who knows me best in the world, most intimately, who knows all of my most fragmentary and unspeakable secrets.

Vomit up what I've told you, if you like. I'd like to. I think it's the only reason I used to drink to such excess -- heaving isn't something my body does on command. If you can do it, then we can all bear witness to the marshalled splatters, the detailed reserves, our history finally visible for all to see.

2009-06-09T13:03:00.001-07:00

I like what she says about the power of clear writing, tho the tone of this article bolsters many internal editors: http://bit.ly/4ya5XW

2009-06-09T10:40:00.001-07:00

This is a test of the ping.fm automatic broadcasting system -- this is only a test

Prompt for a Monday...

2009-06-08T15:13:00.000-07:00

Give yourself 15 minutes.

Grab a notebook, step away from the computer. Take yourself outside, or at least close to a window. Think of an unfinished conversation -- from this morning, from this weekend, from last year.

Could be an conversation between a couple characters you're working with! Let yourself go back there, dive into the dialogue, beginning with what you wanted to say...

Power of Words 2009 - Early Bird Deadline Extended!

2009-06-02T13:10:00.000-07:00

From the Conference website: http://tlanetwork.org/conference/

The Power of Words:
Liberation, Transformation & Celebration Through the Spoken, Written & Sung Word

September 4-7, 2009 at Goddard College, Plainfield, VT

Explore how we can use our words — written, spoken or sung — to make community, deepen healing, witness one another, wake ourselves up, and foster empowerment and transformation. Organized by the Transformative Language Network, and founded by Goddard College, this conference features experiential workshops on a wide range of the expressive language arts and right livelihood, performances, open readings, and celebrations. Make community with others who share your passion. Keynote presenters for the 2009 conference include:

Kayhan Irani, performer of the Theatre of the Oppressed and creator of Artivista, an organization that combines art and activism as a form of political expression and engagement

John Fox, poet, author, poetry therapist, and founder of Poetic Medicine, and author of Poetic Medicine and Finding What You Didn't Lose.

Lewis Mehl Medrona, author of Coyote Medicine, Native American physician and psychiatrist and professor of family psychiatry who calls himself a post-modern, semi-urban neo-shaman.

Dovie Thomason, award-winning Native American storyteller, recording artist and author

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, founder of Transformative Languages Arts, and award-winning author of several books including Write Where You Are and Lot’s Wife, who will be debuting her memoir, The Sky Begins at Your Feet.

Sherry Reiter, poetry therapy pioneer and author of Writing Away the Demons: Stories of Creative Coping Through Transformative Writing will present a workshop with her co-authors.

Callid Keefe & Kristina Perry, facilitators-in-residence and writers on Theopoetics and the Quaker meeting tradition.

Terry Hauptman, artist-in-residence, painter and poet, and author of On Hearing Thunder, Rattle, and Masquerading in Clover.

This year, too, there will be tracks focusing on Narrative Medicine, Right Livelihood, and Social Change.

Visit http://tlanetwork.org/conference/ for more information and to register!

Prompt for a Tuesday: Conversation among our "selves"

2009-05-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

It's Tuesday, and I dunno about you, but I am already well into my week, and the "self" that I am on the weekends feels further and further away by the minute.

Here's a prompt for this morning:
Take a few moments and write down all the "selves" you are in your life right now (or maybe create this list for a character you're working with!). (For instance, my list might include: commuter, database flunky, writer, dreamer, coffee addict, etc.)

Let yourself notice which two of your "selves" take most of your time right now, or are otherwise calling your writerly attention, and let them talk with one another for at least 15 mins...

(Please feel welcome to enter responses to this prompt in the comments!)

Announce: Summer 09 Workshops with Writing Ourselves Whole!

2009-05-07T14:16:00.000-07:00

Writing Ourselves Whole:
transformative writing workshops for the SF Bay Area

Contact: Jen Cross
jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org
http://www.writingourselveswhole.org

Are you looking for an opportunity to create some new and powerful writing in an invigorating, supportive writing community? This June and July, Writing Ourselves Whole is pleased to be offering two full 8-week writing workshops and a Saturday writing retreat:

Write Whole: Survivors Write. Monday evenings, June 1 - July 27. Open to all women survivors of sexual trauma.

Declaring Our Erotic: Take back your sexuality! Tuesday evenings, June 2 - July 28. Open to queer-identified women survivors of sexual trauma.

Raw Silk, an erotic writing retreat open to all women! Saturday, June 20, 10am-4pm.

All workshops offered at the Writing Ourselves Whole workshop space in downtown San Francisco. Register now or visit www.writingourselveswhole.org for more information!

Write Whole: Survivors Write
Eight Monday evenings, June 1 - July 27
Open to all women survivors of sexual trauma

Transforming our language is one of the ways we transform our lives.

Many who are survivors of sexual trauma feel fragmented or disjointed and have come to believe we must always live our lives this way. Writing is one way to regain some control over our experiences and memories, and begin to create new sense out of them.

Gather with other women survivors of sexual trauma in this workshop, and write in response to exercises chosen to elicit deep-heart writing, and deal with such subjects as: body image, family/community, sexuality, dreams, love, faith, and more. You'll be encouraged to trust the flow of your own writing, and receive immediate feedback about the power of your words!

These workshops are open to all women who identify in as survivors of sexual trauma. Though we come together as survivors, we are never required to write any particular version of “our story,” or even write about trauma at all if we don’t choose to! In this space, you have the opportunity to write as you feel called to write.

Although the setting is a supportive one, the workshop is different from a "support group," as the focus of the workshop itself is on each person's writing; we create beauty out of the sometimes extraordinarily difficult stuff of our lives.

Declaring Our Erotic
Eight Tuesday evenings, June 2 - July 28
For Summer 09, this workshop is open to queer women survivors of sexual trauma

Take back your sexuality! Come together with other queer-identified women survivors to create a space in which we struggle with and celebrate our complex sexualities, in an attempt to become less isolated around, and more comfortable talking about, our sexual desires. Each week, we write in response to exercises designed to tap into different aspects of our sexual selves: memory, fantasy, experience, relationship with the body, and more!

You will get more comfortable exploring and talking about sexual desires, receive strong and focused feedback about your new writing, explore the varied and complex aspects of sexuality and desire in a fun and confidential environment, and, of course, try your hand at some explicit erotic writing!

Previous participants have found the group to be transformative, feeling that the work they've done has opened up and changed not only their relationship with their erotic selves, but with many other aspects of their lives as well.

Raw Silk - Women write their erotic
an erotic writing retreat open to all women
Saturday, June 20, 2009
10:00am-4:00pm.
Continental breakfast and light lunch provided.

Treat yourself to a day of good food, powerful writing and great community! In this AWA-method day-long writing retreat, you’ll have the opportunity to get more comfortable exploring and talking about sexual desires, celebrate the varied and complex aspects of your sexual self, and, of course, dive into some explicit erotic writing! Surprise yourself with the power of your sensual/erotic voice. You'll end the day with a rich body of new creative writing and feedback from your peers about what's already strong in your work.

For each of our all-day Saturday writing retreats, we gather in the morning for coffee and some home-baked breakfast, and then write through the rest of the morning. After a break for a light lunch, we keep on diving deep into our work through the afternoon! At the end of the day, we have some conversation about revising and editing our work, and we close by four.

All workshops are open to folks of all writing abilities: whether you write regularly, are an infrequent journaler, or used to write and would like to again, these groups are for you!

Our workshops held in San Francisco in an accessible space, a half-block from BART and on many MUNI lines. Spaces are still available, though limited, and pre-registration is required! Cost for full 8-week workshops is $250; fee for Saturday retreats is $100. Deposits are requested to reserve your space. To register or for more information, email jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org or visit www.writingourselveswhole.org!

Writing Ourselves Whole's founder and facilitator, Jen Cross, is a freelance writer whose work has been published in close to thirty anthologies and periodicals, including Nobody Passes, Visible: A Femmethology, Best Sex Writing 2008, Best Women’s Erotica 2007, and many more. Jen has facilitated writing workshops since 2002. She received her MA in Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College, and is a certified facilitator of the Amherst Writers & Artists method (www.amherstwriters.com, as developed by Pat Schneider).

Founded in 2003, Writing Ourselves Whole seeks to change the world through writing. To open our hearts to ourselves and each other, so that we might live in a community of deep expressiveness and self-love, where each individual reaches his and her most complete self. We exist in the service of transforming trauma and/or struggles around sexuality into art, and creating spaces in which individuals may come to recognize the artist/writer within.

To express our own story changes the world. Writing is both memory and possibility at once, and in moving through and with that tension, we create change.

why join an erotic writing workshop?

2009-04-22T10:54:00.001-07:00

Tonight's the erotic reading circle at the Center for Sex and Culture, and I'm getting my promo materials together for the summer writing ourselves whole workshops, which will include the Monday night survivors writing workshop and a Tuesday night erotic writing workshop for survivors of sexual trauma. During a time when folks are struggling around money, are worried about the well-being of our planet and of our communities, I know it's easy to question why anyone would devote precious time and energy to writing about sex. Why would someone join erotic writing workshop?

A couple years ago, I published the following wrangling with to that question in the Open Exchange magazine here in San Francisco:

Why an erotic writing workshop? The base of all Writing Ourselves Whole workshops is the trans-formative writing process, the option of opening up oneself into the heart of one's experience. An erotic writing has opened, for me, an internal space for previously unexpressed desire, wish, need. This desire has not been confined to the erotic realm – I've found longings unrelated to sexuality rising to my surface, seeking expression and manifestation.

We do not have to be silenced through our limited erotic language any more. One of the things I have learned through both my studies and my own writing practice is that what we know ourselves to be is shaped in large part by how and what we know to say about ourselves – that is, by the words we can put to our inner and outer experiences. The deeper and more complicated our language, the deeper and more complicated – and often, simultaneously, more clear – our sense of our own identity, desire and self.

It can be scary to imagine writing explicitly about sex – with strangers, no less. Here's what you can expect: we write together, as we're inspired, in response to open-ended prompts; we read aloud after writing only if we want to, and, when we do decide to read aloud, our peers in writing respond to our writing as though it's fiction and will tell us what they liked about what we shared. These last two pieces are important – for the erotic writing groups as well as for the survivors writing workshops at Writing Ourselves Whole – and are the main reason that we use the Amherst Writers and Artists workshop model.

Each of us as writers decides what part of what story we want to share or explore and/or create. We may begin with something rooted in the autobiographical, then weave into the fictional, and back again; no one can know what's "fact" – and what listeners will hold on to is the emotional truth of the writing. These are our storytellings, and we will get to hear what's already strong, already working, in our brand new works of art.

You my feel a desire to write but feel that you are not a writer, that you cannot write, maybe because someone in school told you so. It is often the folks with this belief who surprise themselves most with what flows from their pen. You may feel timid around the descriptions of sex and sexuality in your writing, and want a chance to work on that in a safe environment. You may have individual erotic desires that you'd like to explore before acting on. You may simply enjoy writing about sexuality or desire, and want the opportunity to practice your craft. You may be in the mood for something new and different. For all these reasons – and more – folks have come to the Declaring Our Erotic writing workshop.

(Originally appeared at http://www.openexchange.org/archives/OND07/cross.html)

National Assoc of Memoir Writers FREE teleconference tomorrow!

2009-04-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

Visit the NAMW conference site to sign up for tomorrow's telesummit and to get more information. It looks to be packed with amazing information and connections!

-Jen

-------
2009 Second NAMW Virtual Conference

We’re inviting you to sign-up for A FREE teleconference sponsored by the National Association of Memoir Writers to be held on April 23rd starting at 10 AM PDT. You will receive the conference call information after you register.

Schedule of calls are as follows (please note that the times are in PDT):

10:00 AM Kay Adams Writing Through Troubled Times
11:15 AM Dr. James Pennebaker Putting Emotional Experiences into Words
12:30 PM Lucia Cappachione Re-Membering Your Self: Creative Journaling for Memoirists
1:45 PM Christina Baldwin The Spiral of Experience—How Story Changes Over Time
3:00 PM Marina Nemat Writing and PTSD

Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D., President of The National Association of Memoir Writers (NAMW) is host and director of the 2009 Virtual Conference.

Guest Speakers for this year’s conference:

Kathleen “Kay” Adams, LPC, RPT
10 AM PDT | 11 AM MDT | 12 PM CDT | 1 PM EDT

Writing Through Troubled Times:

Journal Your Way from Chaos to Calm

Anxiety is the new pandemic. Our workplaces, families, campuses and communities teem with overload and uncertainty. We’re exhausted by the demands on our personal resources. Money shrinks, conflict swells, and stress shatters our confidence and clarity.

Dr. James Pennebaker
11:15 AM PDT | 12:15 PM MDT | 1:15 PM CDT | 2:15 PM EDT

Putting Emotional Experiences into Words
In this virtual conference Dr. Pennebaker, world-famous psychologist who conducts research on how writing heals, will teach us how expressive writing—writing true experiences with emotional content– creates positive change and promotes the healing of trauma.

Dr. Lucia Capacchione Ph.D., A.T.R.
12:30 PM PDT | 1:30 PM MDT | 2:30 PM CDT | 3:30 PM EDT

Re-Membering Your Self: Creative Journaling for Memoirists

In this teleconference Dr. Lucia Capacchione will discuss the relevance of art, collage, and non-dominant hand writing and drawing in the context of a journal for memoirists. Tapping into rich stores of memories using right-brain techniques, which she originated,

Christina Baldwin
1:45 PM PDT | 2:45 PM MDT | 3:45 PM CDT | 4:45 PM EDT

THE SPIRAL OF EXPERIENCE–How Story Changes Over Time

The power of story allows us to interpret experience in ways that potentially transform facts and events into meaningful insights. It is from the stories we make out of experience that we create the lives we lead and the people we are.

Marina Nemat,
3 PM PDT | 4 PM MDT | 5 PM CDT | 6 PM EDT

Writing and PTSD

Marina Nemat is the author of Prisoner of Tehran where she chronicles her harrowing experience as a prisoner in the famous Evin prison in Tehran. Marina was only 16 years old when she was arrested. She was tortured and came within minutes of being executed.

We are excited this year to present the top writers, researchers, and mentors in the field of therapeutic writing, all of whom were gave us a huge amount of inspiration and information at the 2008 Journal Conference in Denver. Kay Adams, one of our guests for this important telesummit, was the director of this important and first ever conference that brought together for the first time the important people in the memoir, journaling, and therapeutic writing world.

Some of you may want to know the definition of therapeutic writing. Dr. James Pennebaker, one of our guests and the premier researcher in the field of writing to heal, has done many dozens of studies with hundreds of people that demonstrate all the ways that writing helps to heal—the body, the mind, and the spirit. The work of Kay Adams work and Christina Baldwin for the past three decades has been in the area of writing from soul, listening to the inner spirit, and using writing as a way to more deeply know the self. When we are connected with our deepest inner self, we are able to be authentic, to tell our truths, and free ourselves from some of the constraints and pain of the past.

Writing is a way to listen to ourselves, to give voice to what we deeply know about ourselves, our society, our planet. All the presenters at this very special telesummit will help to give us guidance, inspire us, and evoke the desire to use writing as a regular technique in our lives to create wholeness and even happiness.

Please join us for this wonderful and inspiring telesummit. You can also join us by phone for FREE. Sign up here, and you will receive more details about the telesummit, including new presenters and details about the conference, as time draws near.

Note: If you have signed up for last year’s NAMW Telesummit, then you’re automatically added to the list and you need not sign-up for this teleconference.

We saw a double rainbow on the way out of Nebraska after my grandmother's funeral

2009-04-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

4/13/09

Sunflowers are golden. Tarnish is not golden, unless it’s on earrings that were too silvery shiny to begin with and they needed some dark – lilacs and freshly broken playground rocks and crocus blooming through the last of the winter snow and seeing the redbuds on the maple tree and trusting that Spring was really, actually, finally coming for real this time: all golden. Snowstorms in mid-April and a brown Christmas: not golden.

These are the nature things, the Midwest things, the snow shoe shallow things, the walking back home things.

Walking through love into a wall of fear is not golden but bursting that fear with one's faith in oneself and thick love for one’s compatriots is so golden it’s liquid.

He asked me not to bring you because he’s afraid of how it’ll look if you show up there with me, all of my fierce queer family un our leather and pansy dresses and tattoos and brave dye jobs and outspokenness and brazen truth fever and strong flaring unflinching eyes, all of us and our hands locked with lovers or tricks, our hands outstretched toward the pale bodies of a town in the middle of Nebraska that’s not all that far, in philosophical terms, from where Brandon Teena was murdered.

He asked me to come alone, without you, and unspoken was: you can fix your hair nice and put on a black skirt and no one would be the wiser. He wanted me to leave you off the list of my grandmother’s mourners, you heavily-mascaraed boys and fine suit-n-tie wearing girls. He wanted me to put my politics on the slide and my love on the swing and let them occupy themselves while my naked shameful body said goodbye to the woman who taught me about steadiness and safety and comfort and rhubarb-strawberry pie.

He says that if the other mourners see you, they will forget what they were gathered for, they will forget the woman whose life they are at the United Methodist to celebrate and remember, they will turn away from her and focus only on you, on us, on all of us in our un-American oddity.

And I remind him that I have grown from the seed that she planted and they tended, this middlest of middle America, with their water and sunlight and locusts and lies, with their long farms and endless faith and foreverable silencings, with their protestant hymns and communal supers and casseroles brought to the homes of the ill and the dying and all the unspoken sorrows of 200 years of homesteading: I am the fruit of those labors, harvested. They cannot deny us our legacy or our home. They can consider us abnormal, but if we are of them, then we are as strawberry-rhubarb as they are.

I am tired of these transparencies lain over my life, the requests to just be in the closet a little while – as if the closets our families lived in weren’t the most hospitable breeding ground for abuse, as if I want to refabricate those conditions, as if I don’t want to bring some queer sunshine into my family’s hometown, some golden probability for the one or three queer kids still living there and seeing themselves reflected nowhere, living between the crosshatch of Brandon and Matthew, expecting the closet is their only refuge.

He says my grandmother would never ask, herself, that I hide you, and unspoken it’s always unspoken is the point that she would prefer it that way but I look through her photo albums and find, among all the images of grandchildren and their families, several pictures of me with my ex-wife, and I see my grandmother honoring who I am, who she silently, steadily, helps me to be.

'Resurrecting' survivor voices

2009-03-05T16:04:00.000-08:00

One of the pieces of “survivor” identity that I wrangle with is this idea that we must “recover” our voices. I mean the notion that our voices are lost, have been snatched away from us.

The literal truth for most of us is that our voices were always here – and yet swallowing this concept of "lost voice" (en)forces a deep body collusion with the prevailing myths and metaphors of those in power. We internalize the idea that we’re silenced in order, I think, to break free of the reality in fact that we are/were ignored. That there are those who heard what we said, and then just turned their faces away from ours.

I spent years believing that I was silenced, that I had no voice. The fact is that I was unheard–an important distinction. As is true for most kids, I learned not to tell my complete truth while I was growing up, and then, and, like many millions of children around the world, I was trained in secrecy by a stepfather/rapist who took my (en)forced silence as his birthright, and used it as a weapon against me. How do we who are survivors of abuse (sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, psychological abuse) tell our truths in a culture that doesn’t want to really hear people’s words and meanings? We are not heard by abusers who demand a silence they can interpret as “Yes.” We are not heard by a patriarchal, capitalist society that demands our silence so they can overlay our lives with their image of us. We are not heard by a government that usurps women’s tears in order to justify the killing of other women’s sons and daughters.

Sometimes I am left wondering why I should bother trying to communicate at all, when those in power aren’t listening. When I speak, my sentences often come out broken and peculiar, cut off in the middle with long stretches of silence. I stop writing to stare out the window. I stop typing to play with a candle that doesn’t want to stay lit. I stop. That’s their aim.

My aim though, is to start again. After years of internalizing the directives instructing me to be quiet, be quiet, be quiet, I have begun the work of trusting the true power of my voice. I have come to believe in linguistic border-crossing as a means through which to change the world through a renewed sense of speech, voice, self, embodiment, empowerment. One means through which to enact this change is with a writing practice–a regular, repeated experience of coming to aspects of self through writing, through linguistic risk taking; the placing of self and selves on the page; the attempt to name what cannot be named and what we have been told should not be named. I have used this writing practice to struggle with and against the silences imposed on me, silences I’ve been expected to collude with, to put voice and flesh to experiences and desires–both sexual and not–that were never meant to be articulated.

Sometimes it seems we speak into the wind and feel the craziness of unhearing laying across our face and shoulders like a heavy wet blanket. Our government is at war, killing people for no reason other than money and hatred. Here again is the time and place for our writing, through which we can do difficult work. We are a nation of subjected and silenced people. We are a nation of people trained into the difference of others as reason enough to kill them. Millions of people around the world gathered to declare their opposition to a U.S.-led invasion, and the U.S. invaded anyway. Does this mean that those millions all lost their voices? No–they were ignored.

We are a nation raised on our supremacy–the United States of America is the greatest country in the world!–and so many of us believe it even as we see the leaders stripping away our bedsheets and clothes, snatching the food from our and our children’s mouths, tearing down our homes, thieving the books from our children’s hands and tossing it all on the bonfires of their war, tossing it all into their own furnaces; selling our bodies on the open market to the highest or most connected bidder and pocketing the money themselves.

If we don’t tell our stories, others will tell them for us, and they will get them wrong. (I’m not the first one to articulate this fact; who said that?) The stories that others tell for and about you will be used to build policy and pathology, will be used to build houses to hide you in / used to build walls to close around you / will be used to build stories to their own ends / will be used against you. If we do not tell our stories, the stories told about us will be used to our detriment.

Your voice, however it sounds or doesn't, has always been in you, with you, of you, you. And what happens in the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops, in most Amherst Writers and Artists workshops, is that your words – that relentless creative speech and possibility – are deeply attended to, not pathologized or ensnared in sin or broken down but opened into all it’s matter-of-factness, heard as beauty and majesty or rage, walked through as a garden full of flowers, a pond lily marshside.

March retreat on 3/14 and Spring workshops!

2009-03-05T09:44:00.001-08:00

Don't forget: there's a Saturday Write Whole retreat on 3/14, and the spring workshops begin on 4/6 and 4/7! More information below -- visit www.writingourselveswhole.org for more information or to sign up!

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Spring 2009 AWA-model writing workshops
with Jen Cross/Writing Ourselves Whole!

** Write Whole: Survivors Write - Saturday Intensive!
An all-day writing retreat
Saturday, March 14, 2009
9:00am-4:00pm.
(Check-in and registration/continental breakfast 8:30-9:00am)
Light lunch also provided.
~ Treat yourself to a day of good writing, good food, and good community! For each of our all-day Saturday writing retreats, we gather in the morning for coffee and some home-baked breakfast, and then write through the rest of the morning. After a break for a light lunch, we keep on diving deep into our work through the afternoon! We create new art and new beauty out of the complicated realities of our lives. Open to all women who identify in as survivors of sexual trauma.

**Write Whole: Survivors Write**
Special 5-week workshop meets Monday evenings, beginning April 6.

~ Gather with other women survivors of sexual trauma in this workshop, and write in response to exercises chosen to elicit deep-heart writing, and deal with such subjects as: body image, family/community, sexuality, dreams, love, faith, and more. You'll be encouraged to trust the flow of your own writing, and receive immediate feedback about the power of your words! Open to all women who identify in as survivors of sexual trauma.

**Declaring Our Erotic**
Special 5-week workshop meets Tuesday evenings, beginning April 7.
Open to folks of all sexualities and all genders!

~ Are you ready to explore some new edges in your writing? Are there longings you would like to find language for? Now's the time: you may very well surprise yourself with the depth and power of your writing!

This is a deliberately-diverse erotic writing workshop open to folks of all sexualities and all genders. For anyone who's ever thought about writing erotic stories - now's the time to get some of those fantasies down on the page! In these workshops, you will get more comfortable exploring and talking about sexual desires, receive strong and focused feedback about your new writing, explore the varied and complex aspects of sexuality and desire in a fun and confidential environment, and, of course, try your hand at some explicit erotic writing! In addition, if you choose, you may share your manuscripts with peer writers for well-rounded response to your erotic work.

All workshops held in San Francisco in an accessible space, a half-block from BART and on many MUNI lines. Spaces are still available, though limited, and pre-registration is required! Fee for 5 weeks is $175; fee for Saturday retreat is $100. To register or for more information, email jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org or visit
www.writingourselveswhole.org!

About your facilitator: Jen Cross is a freelance writer whose work has been published in many anthologies and periodicals. Jen has facilitated writing workshops since 2002. She received her MA in Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College, and is a certified facilitator of the Amherst Writers & Artists method (http://www.amherstwriters.com/).

Loaded

2009-02-25T10:07:00.000-08:00

I wrote this in Monday's workshop, and it's the beginning of something longer, I think, about how different words are "charged" differently for each of us... xo, Jen
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Yesterday at the bookstore I asked the man behind the counter if they had any books by James Pennebaker.

“I don’t know who that is,” he said.

I waited for him to offer to look the name up, but he didn’t. He was quiet, and for a moment I thought that was going to be the end of the conversation.

Then he said, “What does he write about?”

And so I described how Pennebaker writes about the uses of writing to mitigate the aftereffects of trauma. And the young man behind the counter at this Berkely bookstore said, "Oh, well, I don’t know – but if we had anything like that it would be up in self-help popular psychology – you know, we hear the word ‘trauma’ and we just throw it up there."

Ok. I’d just spent the last hour scanning all the titles in their relatively (at least by today’s bookstore standards) extensive linguistics, psychology and popular psychology sections, and found no books about the uses of writing as a healing or social change craft or practice or tool. But, here, look – I did find this old standby attitude about trauma: It’s not a terribly serious issue, not really, those whiners, put it there next to the What Color is Your Inner Elephant? and How Your Catbox Can Guide You To Enlightenment. I felt that old internalized shame, to be asking for a book about trauma – just one more white woman looking for the language to my loss? What's this attitude about the struggle and strain for transformative experience?

I mourn the feeling that these words of my life are the loaded curse words: trauma, incest: not dyke or pornographer. Those latter words have no power over me, carry no tethers to my own shame and still these years later I cringe under the gaze of real academics, real literary pursuers, rel social change workers who aren’t so ‘bound by their past’ or who are able to just ‘let things go, move on.’ This is me, moving on, with these words, sanded against my face always, chapping my lips and cheeks, reminding me where I come from. This boy-man behind the counter worked it out on my bald face, his fear of this word, this one of the many loaded words we all carry, and how the word becomes a crematorium to connection or even meaning if we aren’t truly listening to each other.

Some words that are loaded for me to hear: incestuous, traumatized, raped—especially, I’ll tell you, when those words are not used to refer to people and their actions against the bodies of, or experiences at the hands of, other people, and instead used thus: the women’s community here is so incestuous, you know? Or, The people are just being raped by the banking execs, huh? These images don’t work for me.

A loaded word is one that is too heavy for metaphor.

The loaded words I use that are not triggering or difficult for me any more but might still score an anvil-dropping line across another’s ear are: lesbian, gay, dyke, queer, survivor, rebel, survivor, Black, white, fucking...; I say these words with impunity, I spend them freely, I have earned the right to let them fall off my lips in every day conversation, at the credit union or with my father. The folks I’m talking to are not always so similarly prepared, their ears not exercised or stretched out, their eardrums are tensed still, they are accustomed to these words being laden with anger. But in my world, these words are laden with fear – ok, sometimes, sure – but they are laden also with love.

These are the buckets of cold water we offer one another to drink. Sometimes, we have to say the difficult thing, just because we know there’s another someone nearby, maybe also waiting in that bank line, whose ears are parched from all the silences, from all the years of people not saying the words that are too heavy for some people to hold. True, sometimes those words are going to sound like that cold water just got thrown in our face, our eyes pop open wide and we get that shocked look, like we just woke up – hard.

We wake each other up.

Listing: one more of the tricks of the "trade"

2009-02-19T10:49:00.000-08:00

I had such a great experience writing in response to the Arts and Healing network interview questions over the last several months -- and I was also, finally, motivated to regularly update this blog.

So, at 6:30am while I was working on my morning pages, I jotted down some more questions I'd like to answer (or begin to answer!) about my work, the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops, the uses of art, and more...

It ends up tricking me into posting more regularly -- we've got to do what we determine will work to get us around our blocks and internalized naysayers, don't we?

So, here are some of the questions I'd love to explore in more depth:

Why don’t I call what I'm doing 'therapy'?

How do silences/silencings in one area of our lives affect the rest of our lives?

What’s the psychological/social effect of transformative writing in community?

How does trauma change the way we “know” things, and then how does art both accommodate and help to reshape that new knowledge/way of knowing (ontology?)

How do we get started with transformative writing?

What does art, experiencing and creating art, do to our brains?

Why would anyone want to write about sex in a group of strangers?

What do people who’ve been in the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops have to say about them?

What’s the difference, psychologically/neurologically, between the creation of visual and verbal art?

How can writing be a spiritual practice? What’s our definition of “spiritual practice”? Does it need to be a spiritual practice? Can writing ever not be spiritual?

Reconsidering 'recovery' - tangling with the voice that says, "I want to get back to where/who I was before this happened."

These are some of the questions tickling the inside of my brain these days, and getting them out there in front of you provides me with some more impetus to actually tackle them.

I've had a lot of my old cognitive science interests re-emerging recently, in particular around the neurophysiology and social/sociological effects of trauma and of trauma recovery through transformative writing (in particular -- though any expressive art, in general).

What about you? What questions do you have about the writing experience, about expressive or healing arts, about Pat Schneider's Amherst Writers and Artists writing workshop method, about erotic writing, or...? Please let me know -- and we can add them to the list!

2009 Workshop Schedule!

2009-02-05T16:13:00.000-08:00

Hello all!

I've finally got the 2009 workshop schedule up on the Writing Ourselves Whole website -- http://www.writingourselveswhole.org/ClassSchedule.htm.

Coming up, we have a Saturday Write Whole Intensive in March, and the Spring workshops begin in April.

Have a look -- and let me know if I can hold you a space!

ERC: something else that gives me hope!

2009-01-29T09:12:00.001-08:00

Last night was the first Erotic Reading Circle of 2009. We had a gorgeous gathering of writers, readers & listeners at the Center for Sex and Culture, some ERC regulars, some newbies, some in-between! The writing was varied and hot, layered and good and challenging and fun. Thank you, writers!

I felt last night the joy about people coming in to a roomful of strangers and god reading their erotica, their secret bright desires, their difficult gorgeous art -- people *so* put themselves on the line. It's beautiful in ways I still struggle for words to describe: words like hopefulness and bravery.

This is a risk every time and people take it. They take that risk. We do. And so that's what's giving me hope right now -- that risk has bravery in it, honest, self-confidence and shaking hands, a faith in art and craft and a passion for language and play, a willingness to listen and be heard. These things are what we need right now to keep this world changing, and so I am grateful!

Next ERC is on Feb 25 -- all are welcome, even if you just want to come on down and listen!