A facilitator's gratitude

This week is the last meeting of this Spring's Write Whole (survivors) and Declaring Our Erotic workshops -- and this is the second write I did last night with my DOE writers, how grateful I am to get to do this work:

Write #2, 6/24/08:

All I can think of is the time we first gathered around this fire and
snuck our way through the worry and possibility into new words
and voices, when we strung ourselves out onto tightropes of fear and
 walked straight into an empty rent-by-the-hour room in the new gay
center downtown and we sat our chairs in a circle and hadn’t yet spilled
 our lust all over and down the fronts of our shirts for everyone else to see.
 We were risking more than we were aware of in that moment, when we
pulled a pen out of our back pockets or dug one out of our bags or snuck
one off the table and we set it to the blank page and we said, “This is
what I think erotic writing can do.”  All I can think of is the time I first
sat in the circle of erotic word makers and then we lifted our pens up
off the page after 7 minutes of scratching and scrawling, just 7 minutes
and the whole world was changed because these folks and hope enough
to write an answer down and then joy and brazen careening flying-fuck
kind of optimism enough to open their mouths and let those same scrawled
words come pushing up through ht heart and lungs, formed by lips and teeth,
into our right now hearing.  And in the aftermath, I said “What stayed?” and
then and ten and then – people risked answering – cause the saying what stays,
 what you remember, is a risk, too, and the shared gifts in that room were
tangible and effervescent, innumerable and yet I tried to write them all
down and there’s nothing hot about this writing / not really / except I still
get caught in that joy     the way that we honor one another’s craftsmanship and
 craftwomanselves, one another’s optimism and grief, one another’s hotness
and brilliance and yes we are forever these writers right now and in the
process of exactly this writing we change and it’s exactly that inoculation
against stagnation that brings me back here    how it’s always already new
 and surprising         how it seems like I know what’s going to
happen but really I just have a vague sense of a potential starting point
and some grapes and crackers to snack on and then we fly and we fly
into the words, we jump and groan into the flames, we lift our hands
back up, sticky and sweaty, and we get to show of        yes       
what magic we’ve done.

thanks, y'all. thanks for reading, and thanks for writing!