why join an erotic writing workshop?

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)

Podcast Answers - Day 8: Thoughts for others who want to do this work

Back in November, I committed to posting longer, more well-thought-out answers to the questions that Britt Bravo posed to me during our Arts and Healing Network podcast conversation. I took a bit of a break at the end of Dec, but I'm back on track. Here’s my answer for day 8!

8. What advice do you have for a writer who wants to use writing for their own healing, or to facilitate healing in others?


This is such a big question – I actually feel I need to break it down into two: Thoughts for folks who want to use writing around their own healing/transformation, and thoughts for those who wish to use writing to facilitate healing with others.


Part 1: Thoughts for folks who want to use writing around their own healing/transformation -

Want to write yourself whole? Pick up the pen and start now. Just let the words come. Don’t pick the pen up off the page, don’t censor, don’t make sense. Don’t stop to worry about whether your grammar works there or if you ought to use a comma or a semi-colon or if it’s time for a new paragraph. Give yourself these 5 minutes, maybe 15. Give yourself a lunch half-hour. Give yourself a morning hour, an evening hour. Shut off the phone and turn away from the computer. Follow the flow, the pull of your writing. Set down in ink or pencil whatever words come up, non sequiturs and nonsense and to-do-list reminders alike, stories and complaints, wishes and dreams and frustrations and remembrances. Let it all come and comingle on your page. Let it flow through the boundaries and the bridges that we build within and around ourselves, the containments and separations, the work stuff and play stuff, the now stuff and then stuff. This writing is just for you. It doesn’t have to be shared or read aloud or posted anywhere, unless *you* want to do so.



Start it now. Do it again tomorrow. Keep up this pattern as many consecutive days as possible, over several years. Continue for a lifetime.

I’m just repeating what I’ve been told, what’s worked for me, what I’ve read. This is the kind of urging that Natalie Goldberg makes in Writing Down the Bones, that Anne Lamott sets before us in Bird by Bird, that Pat Schneider lets us consider in Writing Alone and With Others. Trusting yourself enough to write freely and broadly and openly and deeply -- it creates change.



This kind of freewriting has introduced me to my thought patterns, allowed me to trace out language for experiences that I thought were unnamable, given me meditation and play time. And over time, I’ve learned again to trust whatever my writing wants me to put on the page, to generate material first and then edit later, and to only share my writing when I’m ready, and with folks whose opinions I trust and appreciate. Pat Schneider has an awful lot of good stuff to say about transformative writing when working alone in her book (Writing Alone and With Others).


Part 2: Thoughts for those who wish to use writing to facilitate healing with others -

The experience of this erotic writing group ended up being harder, and more amazing, work than I expected it to be. I don’t know exactly how I could have believed that facilitating a group like this would be easy, or straightforward, or wouldn’t bring up intensely hard emotions for women participating (definitely including me)–but I did, and it didn’t take long for me to understand the error in such beliefs. Yet the women were incredibly supportive of me in this endeavor. They offered me great feedback on my writing, allowed me to fuck up and keep going. They told me they needed what I was doing in this group and I wanted to, and did, tell them that I needed them, as well. We opened and we fed each other words and images, and in doing so, we fed ourselves. I was continually astonished at what happened when these women set pen to paper. We got somewhere together, yet each woman arrived via her own path, with the rest of us as witnesses who walked along with her. All I did, it seemed, was create a space, come up with exercises–it was the women participating who came in and made magic. Every week felt like an absolute miracle, this opportunity to sit in witness with these courageous women. (from my process journal, Fall 2002)

On the one hand, I think anyone ought to be able to do this work. I think to myself, Look, I haven’t had any special training and I did it. I don’t have an MSW or experience as a therapist. But here’s what I do have: personal experience of surviving sexual abuse; training and experience as a volunteer listener for youth and battered women and men; certification as an Amherst Artists and Writers writing workshop facilitator; training as a crisis/peer support group facilitator. All of these skills came in handy during the writing groups I’ve facilitated.

Can you do it without any of this training? It’s hard for me to say, because I have it and the folks I know doing the work have it. Desire is important, as is intuition—both of these are essential, even—but so is experience. It’s important to have the skills necessary such that a group of folks handling volatile material together can engage safely and ethically in the work they need to do. By safely, I mean without psychologically imploding in the group, and assisting others in their struggles not to implode. It’s my experience that the Amherst Writers and Artists workshop method provides a strong and ethical container for the work of transformative writing in community. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t other methods – this is the one that has resonated most strongly for me, both as a participant-writer and as a facilitator-participant.



I have just recently, and finally, been reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and picked up The Vein of Gold to continue the work after I complete the initial 12-weeks of the Artist’s Way. Toward the back of The Vein of Gold, Cameron has a chapter dedicated to those who’d create and participate in creative Artist’s Way circles, and her focus on a non-hierarchical structure and the importance of shared risk (that if there’s a facilitator for the group, the facilitator must “do the work” along with everyone else) absolutely resonated with me as essential reminders for anyone who wishes to facilitate a non-clinical transformative/healing writing space.

Before I was a writing group facilitator, I had training as a peer and crisis counselor–from queer youth service organizations and a domestic violence agency. This means that I had experience with listening to and empathizing with people. I had experience with the fact that, often, the most helpful thing you can do for another person is to listen to them, attentively and devotedly.

This lesson was reinforced via Pat Schneider’s Amherst Writers and Artists workshop facilitator trainings: listen and hear, and model listening for others. It’s a hard lesson to really, deeply internalize.

Difficult things come up in a writing group, whether the group is focusing on erotic writing or sexual trauma or if there’s no particular focus at all. Despite the attention to all work as fiction, the experience of emotion is real: the terror, frustration, lust, anguish, pain, desire, desperation is real. As a facilitator, you’re not going to fix it. You’re not going to offer folks therapy and you’re not there to make it all better for them. That work will be work done by the writers themselves over time, with the help of those whom they choose, and when they choose.



In a transformative writing group, one thing (among others) folks seem to want, as survivors and particularly as writers, is a hearing. That’s what these groups can offer. The original AWA training, for example, helps you acquire a sense of how not to be blown away by heavy, hard, overwhelming emotions; how to ride through hard high intense roller coaster rides of emotion without getting thrown off or shutting down. Most times, you don’t need to do anything but listen, deeply hear and experience the words as they are offered to the group, and to give your personal individual feedback about the writing itself, while modeling for others how to do the same.

The ability to attend to your boundaries is also essential. And even so, even with this training myself, I want to bring each person who has participated in a group of mine into my life and care for them and make everything OK. It’s an empathetic challenge, and there’s nothing wrong with the draw, so long as I don’t act on it: I have to save my energy for the work I can do, the work of bringing together and facilitating these writing groups. It’s hard when all you can do is 1) offer a space, 2) keep the space safe, contained (as much as possible), and 3) listen well and respond personally, heartfelt and ethically–but it’s what I can do, and because it helps, it’s what I must do.




Learn how to take care of yourself. How do you get support and help after group? Do you write and get stuff down and out of you? Do you call a friend or another writing group facilitator? Do you call your mom or sister or uncle? Do you do nothing? Do something, ok? I’m still working on this one, myself, and it’s been six years since I started with this work! Go to the gym, go for a walk or a drive, sing hard, run, go dancing, do something. Let loose the energy that builds up during each group meeting.

If folks don’t have the chance to go through the original Amherst Writers and Artists training, then I absolutely encourage you to participate in an AWA-model writing group in your area, or other writing group. It’s helpful to be exposed to different facilitation styles, if only to learn what not to do, how you don’t want to facilitate (as well as to do the opposite!).

What do you think? What's worked for you, if you've done transformative or healing writing on your own? What's worked for you as someone participating in and/or facilitating a transformative/healing writing space?

Podcast Answers - Day 4: Has writing been healing for me?

Last Monday I committed to posting longer, more well-thought-out answers to the questions that Britt Bravo posed to me during our Arts and Healing Network podcast conversation a couple weeks ago. Welcome to day four!

4. Has [art/writing] been healing for you personally? If so, how?

Writing saved my life. Isn’t that true for so many of us? If I hadn’t had that outlet back when I was 20 and 21 and trying to figure out what had really happened to me, trying to come to a new sense of myself in relationship to words like ‘woman,’ ‘sexuality,’ ‘incest,’ ‘gay,’ and more, I wouldn’t have had any outlet at all, and I think I would have slipped fully into the word ‘crazy.’

I was someone who’d been trained out of the ability to be a friend, had been instructed to trust no one, did not open my deepest thoughts to even my significant others. The person who knew me best in the world, during my adolescence and very young adulthood was the man who’d been sexually abusing me, and even him I didn’t tell everything, despite his very thorough attempt to convince me that he could read my mind, so I might as well tell him what I was thinking since he knew anyway and thus could tell if I wasn’t – it was a measure of my trustworthyness, right?

(On a side note, I recently found this semi-satirical video about mind control "made easy" via bOING bOING and it felt weirdly familiar, even through my wincing laughter.)

The only safe place, I figured out, was the page. I came to realize that he couldn’t get in there (nor, really, could he get into my mind), and so everything came out, messy, jumbled, exploratory, raging, sorrowful, desiring, lusting…


Writing helps me to figure out what I know, what I think. I follow the philosophical lineage of Natalie Goldberg, freewriting daily, following any surprising or ridiculous though, getting it down onto the paper, moving on, not stopping to analyze or decipher, just writing, just writing, just writing. It’s exercise and meditation, it’s possibility and dreaming, it’s sometimes just working my way through the mire.

Writing also has brought me back into a sense of possibility around my sexuality. I initially started writing sex stories “for” my stepfather, but continued it for myself.



This is something I wrote in an (as yet unpublished) essay called “Blame it on Macho Sluts,” about how sex writing has been transformative for me:

When writing, however, I find it easier to get around the boundaries of my sexuality, because I am not directly confronting my own issues. Instead, I sit behind my character’s eyes and come in through the back door to the safety and power of my sexual self. I find solidarity with others, and their troubling desires, their struggles to break through the confines of particular identities. I am able find a home for their desire. In so doing, I may open a door for a reader who had no name for her desire, but felt it or thought it nonetheless. Hell, I might find a home for that desire within myself! When I first read “Jesse” in Macho Sluts I felt [Califia] had presented a mirror to me in the form of my damp and squirming thighs as I read (and reread). In the privacy of my little dorm room, a voice inside my head was saying, “Look at yourself. There’s something here you ought to pay attention to.” No one was around to laugh at me, to scorn or ridicule me, so I could consider this new aspect of my desire that had revealed itself to me. I had language to use, later, when discussing my reaction to the story (and others) with the aforementioned friend, as well. This is what smut writing can do: Help us, as readers and writers, to know ourselves better.

Often, writing smut in and of itself is sexual, is sex, for me. When I am writing well, porn writing brings me into the heart of my own [sex], brings me into my power and fear and lust and desire, and simultaneously into the core of ones I have loved enough to know intimately. This writing is a means through which I continue to heal myself: when my body feels broken and unredeemable, when I am afraid that I will never again be wildly and joyfully sexual, I remind myself that I am wildly and joyfully sexual when I write. I take steps to bring the scenes I imagine (some of them, at least) into the reality of my bedroom.

Yes, writing has been healing for me, and continues to be healing for me! Writing in community, as a last point, is consistently transformative, particularly when I’m writing in an AWA method workshop space: not only am I free to write openly, to follow my writing wherever it seems to want to go, but after I write, I know I’m going to get to read the brand new, heart-just-set-to-beating, piece of writing aloud, and I’m going to have folks tell me what stays with them of what they heard.

This is a powerful experience, every week, of a deep hearing: I tell my story (whatever bit of story got written, fiction or non-fiction, regardless!), I am witnessed (uninterrupted) in that telling, and then folks say what they heard and liked – often I am surprised by what someone liked, “Really? That? Huh…” And then I get to participate in the same sort of hearing for other writers/artists. In my own life, I find that there are so few opportunities to really completely focus on someone else, with no interruptions or distractions, or to be so attended to. For those of us who are survivors—or, truly, for anyone who has felt unheard in their lives, this experience can be terrifying at first, at second, at third (or, you know, at least it was for me!), and, simultaneously, a powerful gift: Oh. I am worth listening to. There’s good stuff in what I have to say, think, create.

This experience can change everything. And has. So, yes, writing (and writing community) is healing for me, still and always.

What about for you?

Podcast Answers - Day 1!

As I mentioned earlier in the week (in this post), I'm going to post longer, more well-thought-out (maybe!) answers to the questions that Britt Bravo posed to me during our Arts and Healing Network podcast conversation last week.

The first question on the list:
1. What are the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops?

Most basically, Writing Ourselves Whole offers transformative writing workshops, using the Amherst Writers and Artists workshop method, 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. (whew!)

I offer erotic writing workshops open to folks of all orientations and all genders, writing workshops to women survivors of sexual trauma, and (periodically) general topic writing workshops as well.

The Amherst Writers and Artists workshop method creates an ethically-boundaried and safe space in which all participants can write as they are drawn to write, and everyone will be encouraged in their writing. Groups are either single-day intensives or eight 2.5-hour meetings; because the groups are closed (not drop-in), participants come to trust one another and thus often allow their work to grow and deepen in risk and playfulness.

Although these groups aren't specifically therapy-focused, the process of writing itself can be a therapeutic and transformative process.

While we're creating narrative and art out of what we think of as the boring (or worse) stuff of our lives, in a community of like-minded others who celebrate our art, our internal selves are rearranged, sometimes without our even realizing it.

Who can participate? These groups are for anyone who currently writes or who has ever wanted to write.

Even if you have not written in years, even if you "only" write in a journal, even if you worry about your spelling when you put words to the page.

It doesn't matter if a teacher once told you that you were a poor writer because your sentences were too long, or that your tenses were incorrect. It doesn't matter if someone once told you that only "great men" can write.

Those were lies. If you want to write, you can write. The truth is that I am blown away by the art created and shared during every single session of writing, regardless of participants' writing history. You have great art in you. If the path that that art wishes to take is through writing, I hope to have the good fortune to work with you.

The Amherst Writers and Artists workshop model, as described in Pat Schneider's book Writing Alone and With Others, arises out of the belief and understanding that everyone has the ability to write: if you can speak (in any fashion), you can create writing that is deep, important, and has artistic merit. I do not ask folks interested in participating in my writing groups for a writing sample, or if/where they've published, or what their experience with writing is -- this is not a competition. Every participant will have a different relationship with writing, and every participant will produce incredible work.

As I say on the Writing Ourselves Whole website, we're "creating communal change through individual transformation..."

My vision? 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. I envision a community aware of its full breadth and power, one that risks speaking truth to power because it has been heard and received by its peers: an empowered community, able to effect change.


The mission of Writing Ourselves Whole is to offer safe, confidential writing groups -- that allow for transformation, risk, laughter, and artistic manifestation -- to a broad cross-section of the community.

Some writing workshops focus particularly on those who've felt marginalized and silenced (survivors of sexual trauma and domestic violence, members of the LGBTQQI communities).

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.

Yes, it’s true. Writing can take you to the things you never thought you'd do, shift you into someone you never believed yourself able to be.