Writing Ourselves Whole - early 2010 schedule!

Happy 2010, all!

Here's a short list of what's coming for me/writing ourselves whole for the first part of the year -- starting next week!

Send me a note for more info (jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org)! (I, on the other hand, commence the deep breathing. :)

xox!
Jen

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Begins next Monday! Winter 2010: Write Whole: Survivors Write. Open to all women survivors of sexual trauma. (8 Monday evenings beginning 1/11) $225-300, sliding scale

Winter 2010: Healing Through Writing: a workshop for folks living with cancer. Through the UCSF Mt. Zion Art for Recovery program. (7 Thursday mornings, begins 1/21) Contact Cindy Perlis for more info:Cynthia.Perlis@ucsfmedctr.org

Jan 30, 2010 (1-4pm): Declaring Our Erotic: a queer women's erotic writing workshop (In honor of the Body Heat Femme Porn Tour!), at the writing ourselves whole workshop space, $20

Jan 29-30, 2010 8pm, $10-15: Body Heat at the Center for Sex and Culture! Join us for one of these SNEAK PEEK pre-Tour shows! Jan 29: Carol Queen / Kathleen Delaney / Jen Cross / Madison Young /Vixen Noir aka Veronica Combs / Amelia Mae Paradise from Diamond Daggers; Jan 30: Shar Rednour / Daphne Gottlieb / Kathleen Delaney / Jen Cross / Alex Cafarelli / Lady Fantastique)

Feb 2010: Declaring Our Erotic: a writing workshop for ALL queer survivors of sexual trauma (4 Tuesday evenings, beginning 2/2, at Modern Times Bookstore. $50-100, sliding scale)

Feb 10, 5:30-6:30: Quick-n-Dirty Erotic Writing happy hour at Good Vibes, Polk St! Free! http://events.goodvibes.com

Feb 13, 12:00-4:00pm: Write Whole with Survivorship. Survivorship is an amazing and community-led org for folks who are survivors of ritual or cult abuse. Free!

March 10-27: Body Heat: Femme Porn Tour. The cross-country extravaganza! In this our fourth installment, Kathleen Delaney (Atlanta, GA.), Diana Cage (NYC), Meliza Bañales (San Francisco, CA), Jen Cross (San Francisco, CA), Nicky Click (Durham, NH),Gigi Frost (Boston, MA), Sossity Chiricuzio (Portland, OR.), Alex Cafarelli (San Francisco, CA.), and Al Schlong (Atlanta, GA) are prepared to rock off all your socks. We begin in Boston and our finale is scheduled for Vancouver! (Visit my website or myspace.com/femmeporntour FMI!

Spring 2010: Write Whole: Survivors Write - for women survivors of sexual trauma (8 Monday evenings beginning 4/5) $225-300, sliding scale

Spring 2010: Declaring Our Erotic: an erotic writing workshop open to everyone! (8 Tuesday evenings beginning 4/6) $225-300, sliding scale

Spring 2010: Healing Through Writing: a workshop for folks living with cancer. Through the UCSF Mt. Zion Art for Recovery program. (8 Thursday mornings, begins in April, date not yet confirmed) Contact Cindy Perlis for more info:Cynthia.Perlis@ucsfmedctr.org

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Want more info? Check out www.writingourselveswhole.org!

Upcoming survivors and sexuality writing workshops: Write Whole: Survivors Write begins Jan 11!

And we begin again!

~ Welcome in 2010 with some deep writing, community connections, and solidarity with your resilient artist self ~

Our 8-week Write Whole: Survivors Write (for all women survivors of sexual trauma) begins January 11, and we've got a half-day queer women's erotic writing workshop on Jan 30! More info on each is below; spaces are still available -- please let me know if you have any questions or would like to register -- I'd love to write with you!

Write Whole:
Survivors Write
Eight Monday eves. Begins Jan 11.
Open to all women survivors of sexual trauma!

Transform your relationship with your writing -- and with yourself. For survivors in particular, writing freely in supportive and attentive community opens us up to the possibility of being fully heard in all of our expression, creative and otherwise!

In this workshop, 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. We create new art and new beauty out of the difficult and complicated realities of our lives.

You'll be encouraged to trust the flow of your writing voice, and receive immediate feedback about the power of your words!

Spaces are limited and pre-registration is required. Cost for the 8 week class is on a sliding scale, $225-300 (please contact me about payment plans or other money questions!)

To register, visit www.writingourselveswhole.org or email jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org.

About your facilitator: Jen Cross is a widely published freelance writer. She's a queer incest survivor who used writing as a transformative and integral part of her own healing process. She's a certified AWA Facilitator, has led writing workshops with survivors since 2002, and writes with folks about trauma, sexuality, and more. More info, always, at writingourselveswhole.org.

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Also in January:

Declaring Our Erotic -- Let's write about sex!
Jan 30, 2010, 1-4pm
An erotic writing workshop for queer women -- in honor of the Body Heat: Femme Porn
Tour!

Ever read through a sexy short story and thought, "I'd like to do that!" This writing workshop is for queer* women who's considered writing erotic stories or writing about sex, or who'd like to get more comfortable doing so! No previous writing experience is necessary.

We each need safe space in which to be our whole erotic selves -- to delve into the fantasies and imaginings that we've learned or been told don't "go with" our public sexual identities. In this workshop we'll celebrate and struggle with the fullness of our erotic expression.

In this 3-hour class, you'll have the chance to try your hand at some explicit erotic writing. We'll write in response to exercises designed to tap into different aspects of our sexual selves: memory, fantasy, experience, relationship with the body, and more.

Don't be surprised if you find, as have previous participants, that you're more comfortable discussing your own sexual desires after practicing writing about fictional sex! Bring your notebooks or laptops and your most open mind.

When: Saturday, January 30, 2010, 1:00-4:00 PM
Where: writing ourselves whole workshop space, 870 Market St, SF!
Who: 18+
Cost: $20

To register, visit www.writingourselveswhole.org or email jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org.

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* and by 'queer women', I mean folks who identify as women (which doesn't mean you have to use the pronoun 'she') and also identify as lesbian, gay, genderqueer, dyke, butch, femme, tomboy, same-gender loving, "into women," boi, transbutch, stud, or...

Why sexuality and sexual trauma writing together, in the same ‘house’?

I still panic, sometimes, talking about the fact that I lead both erotic writing and sexual trauma survivors writing workshops; there’s still that ingrained sense, for me, that these two things just don’t go together. I don’t think I probably need to explain this as often as I think I need to – and yet, every now and again, I dive back into the why.

Why sexuality and sexual trauma writing together, in the same ‘house’? Restorying our sexuality lets us come back here, into our bodies, the site of trauma, the site of violence against us if we are survivors of sexual trauma. Restorying, writing our desire, our history and too our now longing, re-embodies us in a safe-ish way (writing’s not completely without risk, of course: if the writing is to carry and convey the depth and breadth and truth of a story, an experience or possibility and that means the writing needs to be embodied and that’s a big fucking deal for sexual trauma survivors – embodiment). Writing is a way to settle into ourselves, slow back inside our skin – not the only way. One way.

When we write desire – any desire: fantasy or fiction or what just happened this afternoon – we are back in our skin, we experience the want, we feel its flesh and tingle and joy, and, too, struggle and ache and loss and fear. We can write, and so we can feel, a body free of flashbacks – and, too, we are deeply familiar with the truth of an erotic desire riddled with holes and loss and so we can describe it fully, gorgeously, achingly real and hot.

We who are sexual trauma survivors know how to embody another’s ostensible desire, because that was our job. What erotic writing can allow us to do is come into ourselves, our own wonders and imaginings – allows us to smell and taste ourselves again, or for the first time.

That’s where these two – sexual trauma and erotic writing – come together for me, are necessary together for me. In writing about sexual trauma, we can forget - we can wish to forget - about the weight of erotic desire. We can want to wipe it from our skin because that very desire sends blood pulsing through the body that was raped, makes flush the landscape of loss and terror, and who wouldn’t want to forget that place?

But we inhabit the scene of the crime. We can't ever fully vacate this place, this body, not while we're living: and an embodied erotics, a deeply creative lust for the world, was our birthright, long before we were born. We deserve to settle back fully into our bodies again. One way I've worked myself back up to the edges of my skin and beyond is through writing it.

We can claim now the heavy trail of longing, bent or shaped by our survival, we can eroticize shame, if we need to, we can claim a chosen pain because consent changes everything. We can write exactly the sex we want and deserve, and when we write it we embody it, and when we embody it, that’s a reclamation. That’s a restorying. That’s a restoration. What was slashed and burned can always take new life again, given time and space from the trauma. We tend this wound, this body, this site. Erotic writing can be damn joyful – and that joy is the tilling, the rainwater, the harvest

'new' survivors

This weekend, a couple of amazing women (thank you Kiki and Elicia!) organized a Peace March and Rally in Richmond, CA, to raise our voices and gather our energies in support of the high school student who was recently raped by a mob of young men -- and, too, to speak out against all sexual violences: against all sexualized violence, against all the messages we teach our children equating masculinity with violence, femininity with passivity, against rape as a weapon of war, against sexualized violence as a part of our every day lives.

After missing the first part of the rally, Fresh! and I got to ride alongside the march for a minute, honking, making a whole lotta noise -- and we were met with the voices and shouts of the marchers! Then he dropped me off and I jogged to catch up with the small march, raised my voice -- it felt good to shout, and I had to cough a couple of times after being so loud: it seems my voice box has grown unaccustomed to loud chanting -- and that's one reason I understood it was good that I was there.

It's been several years, it seems, since I participated in this sort of anti-sexual violence/pro-peace-for-all rally. It's been several years since I walked through quiet neighborhoods and shouted: No Rape! No Rape! Was the last time in Maine? How could that be?

It's not that I haven't gathered, haven't witnessed and participated. The last rally in Richmond, last year, for another gang-rape survivor, was a mostly silent candle-lit vigil. That sort of gathering carries its own weight -- all of our stories, all of our friends' and families' stories, candlit and hungry, sitting just inside our mouths, held and honored and shared in that big big quiet.

I became aware, during the public rage that followed reports of this assault, messages and articles and furious notes I read and listened to online and from friends, of my presence in the aftermath. It's where I live and work: in the aftermath of sexual violence. the workshops I facilitate, the writing I do, it's about the after-story -- what comes next. All the words I use are prefaced with "re-": reclaim, restitution, resurrect. Doing over. Taking back. I don't live anymore in the place of before. Because I can't. My own body is an aftermath.

And so it was that I felt, too, on this Saturday, that our gathering was kind of the saddest sort of welcoming committee for this young woman. She is one of us now. She has a new name: survivor. Victim. The debates bat those words back and forth, but the fact is that she wears them now. Like we do. She has been violently delivered to our side of the battle ground. And we are standing up to show her she is among our kind now; we put our hands around her and we tend her wounds. These wounds are of her now. She lives in and with them. As we do, too.

I don't want this for her. I don't want this for her family or friends. I don't want this for any of us. I want other options. I don't want any more rallies of survivors to have to gather at the gates of the next rape, the next rape, the one happening right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. I want us to be able to disperse these energies, move on to other work -- raise our voices in praise of love, not in rage and sorrow.

I raged on Saturday, was grateful for all those gathered, and on Sunday I cried. I felt, again, the big, high vision of the hawk that flew over our gathering toward its end: from up high, I can see that this change won't manifest in my lifetime. I won't live to see it. But if I don't continue to hold on to the hope, hold hands open to the possibility that we as humans can learn to relate to and with one another through something besides the veil of violence and rage, then I close one more light shining the way -- does that make sense?

I don't see how we can make the changes we want to make. I don't see how we can get there, when sexualized violence is an ever-present option for men, for women, for anyone in power over any other one. I can't see it. I can't.

But -- here's the but: I stand together with a group of folks who might otherwise pass one another on the street in judgment, we raise our voices too loud, just loud enough for a Saturday morning neighborhood, we listen to one another's words and possibilities, we hear young men and women stating new ways, and I hold my hands open to the change one more time. I let my heart imagine it. I listen to men hold men accountable. I listen to women holding one another accountable. We are accountable to one another or there's nothing left.

If we don't keep working -- which means imagining, which means speaking the possible -- saying, yes, this can change. We can change -- there's nothing for the next generations carrying the torch, lighting the way. Right?

I don't want to be in one more 'welcoming' committee, bringing blankets and hotdish and tea and notebooks and pens and oranges and candles to the newly fallen -- and still, yes, that's where my work is right now.

How do we reframe (there it is again: re: frame) this -- life? This human-ness?

Does this make sense? Tell me what you think --

'indelible erotic loss'

A man at the Indy Arts Expo this weekend stopped at Fresh!'s table (we were there to promote Affirmative Acts Coaching!), and this man and I talked a little bit about the writing workshops. I said I did a little bit of blogging, about sexuality, about sexual trauma, about writing as a transformative practice -- he was very interested in what sorts of sex blogging I did, said, "I'm trying to figure out what about sex you write about."

Here is what I want to have said: I write about sex in the aftermath of sexual trauma, I write about the scarred desire that remains. I write about that crystalline brilliance and shame. I write about indelible erotic loss, the way it fills our hands sometimes at the same time we are touching someone... I write about the madness of that split, the surrender and joy of it, too. I may not be what you'd expect of a 'sex' blogger.

What would I tell them?

(This was the prompt...)

“What would you tell young friends who are afraid?” what I want to say is that the night sweats happen and then they are gone, the same nightmare appears for years and then its terrifying physics and grammar begin to transform around the dreaming you: suddenly you can pseak, you can move, you can run, you can say, now, No when before the word could only push from your lips into a screaming wait that woke you and your lover at midnight.

You see from those dreamtime changes that you are healing, your seams are coming together and it’s a slow, it’s an interminable process it will seem like it’s never ending and it ought to. Feel every minute of it, let the loss and terror burn through and be done with you. Someday it will be done with you, because you stayed with It, because you were not thrown by the fire and rage that you yourself contain.

This is a terrible thing that I’m recommending, I know.

Write it all down, all of it, even the stuff you know can’t be testified to in a court of law but that sits still on your tongue to be spoken: better to spit out the lies they fed you onto the page rather than swallow them. Now and again you can flip back through your record, see, read, how you have changed in two weeks, two months, 10 years. Build a bridge to your whole unsullied soul, still locked safe inside you, with those words. Write out all your complications and conflicts, the ways you are always in conflict, the jealousies and inconsistencies and fears. Don’t show it to anybody. These are the places we have.

Be more afraid of finding out what loss looks like from the inside out, be more afraid of losing the ability to write before you have recorded all that you are. This is you creating your own rabbit trail. Hansel and Gretel aren’t throwing down any bread crumbs or stones for us. We write our own Wonder Woman, Batman, Savior – we write ourselves ahead when we say right now what’s true. It’s the only lily-pad-hopping way forward I know. Settle into this skin of confusion with your pen in hand. Stitch away time out of your day just for writing. Let the words be the only think you hold.

And then feed yourself well. Visit the doctor or NP now and again. Call the good friends, the ones who leave you alone when you’re writing, the ones who don’t try to fix it when you cry, and see if they want to go to the beach with you. Put down the pen and pack up a lunch, get on the 5-Fulton without a book and watch through the bus’ grimy windows as the grey concrete of the city give way to the contagious riot of green in the park . Get out at the last stop and walk yourself into a thick salty sea breeze. Feed the tides your bare feet, take your friend’s dry warm hand, hold the seagull’s cries into your newfound ears.

Upcoming workshops with Jen & Writing Ourselves Whole -- August 2009!

Read on for more information about the upcoming Declaring Our Erotic and Write Whole workshops with Jen & Writing Ourselves Whole!
heart power!

Declaring Our Erotic-Reclaiming Our Sexuality
Eight Tuesday evenings, beginning 8/11/09
Open to queer women survivors of sexual trauma!

Have you been thinking about exploring some new edges in your writing? Are there longings you'd like to find language for?

Now's the time: Changing our language can change the way we understand ourselves and our desires! Once again, I'm opening this workshop explicitly to queer women survivors of sexual trauma who want to continue the process of reclaiming their sexuality.

In this erotic writing group, we write in response to exercises that engage or invoke various aspects of our erotic, sexual and sensual selves, in a safe and confidential group of peers. Get more comfortable writing about sexual desires, receive strong and focused feedback about your new writing, explore the varied and complex aspects of sexuality and identity, all while trying your hand at some explicit erotic writing!

In these 8 weeks, you'll create an exciting body of fresh and (often) surprising new writing, and my very well find that your experience of your erotic voice/erotic power has been transformed.


Write Whole: Survivors Write
Eight Monday evenings, beginning 8/10/09.
Open to all women survivors of sexual trauma!

Transform your relationship with your writing -- and with yourself. For survivors in particular, writing freely in supportive and attentive community opens us up to the possibility of being fully heard in all of our expression, creative and otherwise!

In this workshop, 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. We create new art and new beauty out of the difficult and complicated realities of our lives.

You'll be encouraged to trust the flow of your writing voice, and receive immediate feedback about the power of your words!

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All workshops held in an accessible, downtown San Francisco office, near Powell Street and Market - close to Bart & Muni.

Spaces are limited and pre-registration is required.

Fee for each 8 week workshop is $250.

To register, email: jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org.

About your facilitator: Jen Cross is a widely published freelance writer. She's a queer incest survivor who used writing as a transformative and integral part of her own healing process. She's a certified AWA Facilitator and is currently leading workshops at UCSF for folks living with cancer.

More info: www.writingourselveswhole.org.

Note: These workshops are open to individuals who identify on the woman/female spectrum and who also self-define as survivors of sexual trauma. Categorizations of gender can be highly problematic and I believe that both "women" and "survivor" are self-defined! Please don't hesitate to contact me if you're wondering whether you should attend or not.

This is what my story contains

(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.