UCSC's Art of Healing

UCSC's Survivors Healing Center has put out a call for submissions for its "Art of Healing" event and exhibition. Deadline is 10/1 -- the performance and artist's reception are in early November.

More information and submission guidelines here.

The Survivors Healing Center has been working specifically with survivors of child sexual abuse since 1987...

Blogging our workshop creations #1

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do with the raw material that we create in workshops – and often, it’s not necessary to do anything; there’s powerful work done just in the act of writing, in the act of creation. Yet, there are times when I want to return to a piece, and I’m not sure how to pick up where I left off… the first thing I have to do, of course, is transcribe the work from my notebook into the computer. And one of the things I’ve decided I’d like to do is put more of this work up onto my blogs.

From a mid-July meeting of the Monday survivors writing workshop, one of my own exercise responses:

It’s difficult, the things that are known and the things that are unknown, and when I say difficult, I mean shitty and infuriating, and when I say ‘are known’ and ‘are unknown’ in that most passive voice, what I mean is the things I can say for certain and the things that I could possibly have never said for certain because when they were occurring I was without a root in language, my mouth floated out, into an obliterating twisting and carnivorous extermination whenever I tried to find the words, and now, I am without a root in time or place or truth.

And then, even here, I wonder if any of this makes sense.

Sometimes all I want is to speak to other survivors, cause sometimes all that needs to be said is, You know?, and you make a face and your affect says everything and you don’t have to explain and they say Yeah, and hen you both nod and you’re sort of silent, not because now you’re trying to swallow, once again, a desire to tell, to have someone else understand, but because s/he meant it when s/he said Yeah. S/he gets it, whatever the shitty thing is, and there’s no need to wrangle up into the terror of words that can never really speak the truth anyway…

What I want to know is a matter of fact timeline, but what goes beyond the point of contamination to the honest-to-god wreckage that is my memory is the fact that isolation/disconnection/dissociation during an experience means that some things are just not possible to anchor in time. So, of course, these rememberings just float around in my body, my brain, a whole smeared fabric of my adolescence, a thin, dense stain on what was otherwise apparently, to the rest of the world, a perfectly privilegedly normal and cohesing existence.

What I know is what happened – hands on the only budding places of my body, the truth of years spent readying me for his ultimate goal – and what I don’t know now – besides why, because who cares? – is exactly when. Was I fourteen or sixteen? Still in junior high or high school? Was it winter outside? Summer? Were the birds throbbing alive in all the trees or were the outsides silencing in solidarity with my own?

What I don’t know is how to make poetry of this. What I don’t know is how to stop wanting to know – wanting these peculiar answers. What I don’t know is why it matters if I figure out now, twenty years later, that Ok, yes, I must have been fifteen when that part happened, when the body of me came pressing tight to my lips, when I felt all the air escape from what I thought was the secure solidarity, the impenetrable mask, of my thick skin.

I put a period there, but I think I was asking a question, wasn’t I? What I’d really like to know is how to, just once, twist that image of his body and my body on that cheap squeaky brass-framed bed into a work of art that even my ears could find beautiful – no, maybe not beautiful, maybe not honoring, but no more pedantic and not any more pity-worthy – I’d like for these images to begin finally doing service to some other kind of truth.

Really, I’d like to elect them out of their only residence in my brain and push them hard onto the paper, tape them cheaply down with crappy tape that quickly pulls up and dirties at the corners, push those bilious, billowy pictures flat for once, let them be seen in two shallow, sullen dimensions, show them – yes, sure, finally – to my mother and father, let them see what was happening, share these pictures with my sister, like trading cards. We would sit, cross-legged, in the clover park with the summer bees all around and chew our big words of gum while the wind blew the hair all around our faces and we’d finally look at all we could not share or see before, in the vast, thick safety of that warm afternoon.

7/16/07

The Revolution and the possibilities of beauty

I’m reading The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex (edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence), and I am feeling hopeful. It’s so scary to imagine being truly non-competitive, remembering that I am a part of a movement and that I am not alone, not reinventing the wheel, that there are all these communities, like circles of friends – and sometimes like cliques – that I am a part of: anti-violence movements, anti-rape movements, movements challenging sexual violence, power of words movements, sex educators, pornographers, writers, racial justice activists, movements questioning abuses of power and hierarchy, queers, and anti-conformity communities…

I have all this energy and the coffee is making me impatient with the movement and slowness of my hands, this physical body. So, while reading, I am also thinking about how to do this work. I don’t feel it’s necessary to shape my mission to feed funders’ language requirements – I have just seen that so many times, seen people lose jobs and others lose services/communities/programs because of an ostensibly-surprising loss of funding. I see organizations losing track of who they’re there for – not funders, right? Aren’t our non-profits supposed to be in the service of/to the people?

Of course, this has changed radically, this idea that all non-profit organizations exist to serve the people, rather than those foundations paying the bills. So what do we do, we organizers and activists and social change workers who want to somehow keep a roof over our heads while also devoting our lives to doing the work we believe in, to changing our communities, to engagement with others doing the same?

I believe in the power of words to save us and to transform us – and I believe that individual transformation is an important and necessary ingredient of larger social change. I believe in the mantras of One at a Time and that real, lasting change is slow steady, persistent change: like practice. Change isn’t a one-time thing. It’s an every-day, collaborative and individual (both) bit of consistency. I believe that change is relationship-based, that change happens through connection and through the reality of hearts recognizing each other, no matter how different we thought we were on all of our various surfaces.

We don’t have to do what everyone – i.e., the “mainstream” – says we have to do to survive; we can create new possibilities through our words, through our sharing, which create fissures inside of and alongside the systems that have shaped and snared us. My stepfather (and perpetrator) was very fond of the spaces in-between. He believed in shiny surfaces and lies, taught me to look critically at what hides in plain view. This was unfortunate for him. We saw him hiding there because he revealed himself to us (ah, the way entitlement eventually hangs itself!), and we held him to account (to some extent, anyway).

I am not someone who *believes* too much in shiny things. Now, shiny and polished are nice, but I recognize that they're fronts.

I do not believe in hiding in plain view. I believe in visibility. I also believe in using what’s available and loving all the spaces we exist within: that is, looking at our whole world and admiring not just the storefront, but also the back alley and the unweeded side yard, and the spots that need paint and repair. I like seeing the real, the spaces still dirty, the smudged mascara, the pressed shirt with a stain, broken fingernails, chipped teeth – the broad possibilities of beauty.

Hello world!

This is a test of the new Writing Ourselves Whole blog!