Spring workshops with Writing Ourselves Whole!

(please feel welcome to forward this information! thank you!)

Writing Ourselves Whole
Spring 2010 Workshops


This April, re-engage with the deep-rooted and transformative power of writing!

Join us in one of our exercise-initiated and non-judgmental AWA writing workshops:

Write Whole: Survivors Write
Monday evenings, 4/12 - 6/7
Open to all women survivors of sexual trauma

Declaring Our Erotic
Tuesday evenings, 4/13 - 6/8
Open to all (18+, please)

o In the Write Whole: Survivors Write workshop, you'll gather with other survivors of sexual trauma to create new art and new beauty out of life's difficult and complicated realities. Learn to trust the flow of your own writing, and receive immediate feedback about the power of your words!
Remember: identity categories like 'woman' and 'survivor' are self-defined!

o In the Declaring Our Erotic workshop, you'll try your hand at some explicit erotic writing, and, in so doing, will get more comfortable exploring and talking about sexual desires, explore the varied and complex aspects of sexuality and desire, receive strong and focused feedback about your new writing!

No previous writing experience necessary! 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 each eight-week workshop is $225-300, sliding scale.

To register or with any questions, contact Jen at jennifer (at) writingourselveswhole.org.
For more information, please visit www.writingourselveswhole.org!

12/17: Holiday Dirt: fecund new erotica! A benefit for writing ourselves whole...

Please help to spread the word! xoxoxo


Writing Ourselves Whole presents
~Holiday Dirt: fecund new erotica~
a benefit reading and celebration!


With special guest Carol Queen!
Featuring Alex Cafarelli, Lou Vaile, Amy Butcher, Renee Garcia, Jenn Meissonnier, Blyth Barnow and Jess Katz!

Burlesque! Sweet treats! Chapbooks!

When: Thursday, December 17, 7:30 SHARP
Cost: $10-50: sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds
Location: Center for Sex and Culture, 1519 Mission Street (between 11th and South Van Ness), San Francisco, CA 94103

Your winter holidays shaping up to be a bit too wholesome? Never fear -- join Jen Cross as she presents these fierce new works from the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops, sharp and sexy writing that will delightfully sully your holiday spirit and open your mind to all sorts of new reindeer/dreidel games!

Celebrate risky writing and readings -- let us inspire your erotic imagination.

~~ Can't make the reading on 12/17? You can still help writing ourselves whole! We are raising funds to pay for our workshop space: whatever you can give will help! Click the link/button below to use PayPal to send your donations. Thank you so much!

A fundraiser for Writing Ourselves Whole (Declaring Our Erotic/Write Whole workshops), which exists 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.

Saturday 11/21 -- Body Empathy

Body Empathy:
A day of body mindfulness, gentle movement and writing for queer, genderqueer
and trans survivors of sexual trauma

Facilitated by Alex Cafarelli and Jen Cross
10am-4pm, Nov 21, 2009
At The Space, 4148 Mac Arthur Blvd., Oakland
(The Space is wheelchair accessible)

No previous experience necessary! Pre-registration required. Fee: $50-100,
sliding scale (Please check in with us if funds are an issue—payment plans are
always possible, and we may be able to work out trades or other arrangements
as well!) Please write to jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org to register.

What if we could truly experience empathy for our bodies as they are – and
then, by extension, for ourselves, as we are?

As queer, genderqueer & trans survivors with a wide array of backgrounds and
identities in a sexuality-/gender-restrictive culture, our self-protective
tendency can be to “check out” by detaching mind from body to such great
degrees that it can be dangerous. Physical activity and writing are two ways
to check back in with your embodied self.

With deep respect for the privacy and variety in our personal experience of
gender expression and our individual histories, this workshop will create safe
space for participants to embrace our bodies as they are, and to write the
stories our bodies have been wishing to speak, while allowing possibility for
the integration of identity and physical presence. Using brief writing
exercises and low impact body mindfulness exercises derived from
improvisational theater, Zen meditation practice, and the internal Chinese
martial arts, participants will have the opportunity to fully embody our
gender complexity in a healing and playful environment.

The exercises we practice can be easily incorporated into our daily lives and
can enhance our ability to reflect mindfully on our experiences, while
interacting with others from a place of self-acceptance, internal power, and
confidence, as we move through the world as the fabulously feisty queer &
gender warriors we are…
________________________________________

Your facilitators:

Alex Cafarelli is a Jewish genderqueer femme trauma survivor with a background
in 17 years of martial arts training. Currently teaching body mindfulness
classes in Oakland, Alex also works as a gardener specializing in
drought-tolerant and edible landscapes, does Reiki/massage bodywork, and
develops and leads element-based rituals to support women, queers, transfolk,
and genderqueers in moving through transitions and healing from trauma. Cntact
Alex at petals_and_thorns@yahoo.com.

Jen Cross is a queer incest survivor and a widely-anthologized writer who has
facilitated survivors and sexuality writing workshops since 2002. She offers
two weekly AWA-method workshops (Write Whole: Survivors Write and Declaring
Our Erotic) in San Francisco. Fnd out more about Jen at
writingourselveswhole.org or write her at jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org.

'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 --

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!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.

Announce: Summer 09 Workshops with Writing Ourselves Whole!

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!

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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.

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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.

'Resurrecting' survivor voices

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.

Unexpected offline-ness

I apologize for the unannounced break in my posting schedule! So, I'd planned to keep on keepin' on with my bi-weekly posts all through the last couple weeks. It turns out, though, that I needed to take some time away from the computer. Most weekdays, I spend at least 8 hours on the computer, and something that I've offered myself during this end-of-Gregorian-year vacation has been some time not linked up: baking and painting, instead; movie-watching and stargazing instead; reading and beach-walking instead. It's been deeply, deeply good; necessary, even -- bringing up fully into my consciousness how much of a break I really need.

Besides thinking about a 2009 schedule, what's been heavily weighing on my mind are these horrors:
- Israel is massacring Palestinian civilians with the apparent approval of the US and the UN, using such similar justificatory language to Bush's -- the world is watching; can we stop this brutality?
- a woman was brutally gang-raped in Richmond a few weeks ago -- there have been four arrests made: a 31 year-old man, a 21 year-old man, a 16 year-old boy and a 15 year-old boy. A 21 year-old, a 16 year-old and a 15 year-old. I want to write more about what I see as so many terrible barbed-wire layers around this case, and yet, how can I seriously start to take apart for individual consideration the very recent threads of this survivor's experience? Just because some suspects have been caught by the criminal justice system doesn't mean that justice has been or will be served -- real communal change, I mean an actual ending of rape as a tool of social control and violence and terrorization, continues with our conversations, our vigils, our communities holding the perpetrators accountable, our ongoing work. We cannot trust the State to do it for us.

I *am* going to finish the Arts and Healing Network podcast question responses! These are the questions we still have to think about:

8. What advice do you have for a writer who wants to use writing for their own healing, or to facilitate healing in others?
9. What inspires you the most about your workshops?
10. What gives you hope right now?
11. What are you working on right now with your own writing, or writing workshops?
12. Is there anything else you didn’t get to talk about that you would like to share with listeners?

I'll be back on my regular posting schedule next week. Much love and peace to all of us, ALL of us, goddess knows we all need it, this new year.

Nov 19: Your words and art are needed!

from http://www.stopcsa.org/talktostop/:

Stop the Silence: Stop Child Sexual Abuse, Inc. (Stop the Silence, www.stopcsa.org), in collaboration with Art for Humanity (South Africa) and The Global Lesson Foundation (Canada) and other collaborating organizations (Survivors Healing Center, Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence) request your input for the first annual "Stop the Silence: Talk Around the Clock" marathon to stop the silence about child sexual abuse (CSA). On November 19, 2008 we will start talking and presenting art and information through the Web from people around the world who want to add their work and thoughts to this movement, and we will not stop for twenty-four hours. We can present your work (e.g., we can air a clip of your poetry) or you can present it live through a special Web program that will allow others throughout the world to see and/or hear you.

We need your voice, art, and information.

* We need your voice if you are a survivor, a bystander, and/or a supporter of the prevention of child sexual abuse.
* We need your voice to help celebrate the courageous efforts of past victims, survivors and those who have supported them.
* We need your voice if you are an individual, organization or celebrity who believes that no child, regardless of geography, culture or heritage or economic status, should have to endure any form of sexual abuse.

Let Your Voice Be Heard!!

HOW to get involved?

Click here on the talktostop.com link to upload your on-line abstract and your art, your poetry, your presentations, your dance clips, and/or your plays.

WHAT can you contribute?

We will review submissions and most submissions will be included in the 24-hour period (we will vet for appropriateness). Many different types of information can be submitted. Here is a sampling:

* Art stills (paintings, drawings, sculpture) created by survivors or those who have supported survivors of CSA to be presented during the 24-hour period.
* Art to donate, display in our marathon and to be put on the sell4change auction site. All proceeds will go to further the education and prevention of CSA.
* Poetry, dance and theatre by survivors or supporters of a change in how societies deal with CSA. You can upload a video or audio clip for presentation, or you can submit your work to be reviewed but then present it live within the 24-hour, Nov. 19th marathon.
* If you are a celebrity you can offer your voice and opinion by uploading video clips or monologues about your story, history, experience or view of child sexual abuse. These clips will be aired through the marathon. It is possible for you to present your views live if you so desire.
* Formal presentations (e.g., speaking live from your computer and/or PowerPoints).

Submit your presentation for review and let us know whether you intend it to be shown by you in a live format or presented on our end through an available tape or other materials.

If you are an individual or an organization combating this silent epidemic, we encourage you to upload your presentation regardless of the type of media (e.g., PowerPoint, video clip, audio clip) – note whether you want to present it live or “taped.” We ask that presentation not exceed 45 minutes from start to finish to allow a 15-minute interactive question and answer period. If submitting a presentation, we ask you to identify whether you would like conduct it live or if you would like to pre-record it and let us air it for you.

All presenters will be given an in depth tutorial and manual on how to use the collaboration software developed for The Global Lesson and this online event.

This Wednesday, June 18: Thriving Against the Odds!

This is going to be a gorgeous event, folks -- come on down to the Dolores Park Cafe and share in the fierceness of survivor voices and strength!

Thriving Against the Odds
A Co-Fundraiser for
CUAV and the SF TransMarch

Celebrating and honoring visibility and safety in our queer and trans communities!

Wednesday, June 18TH 7-10PM
Hosted by the Dolores Park Cafe (corner of 18th and Dolores, San Francisco)
$10-50 Sliding Scale

FEATURING:
Community Volunteer Award Winner Ms. Sarah D. as our MC
And performers Jen Cross, Dorian Katz, Jeff Jacobson, Redwolf Painter, Mr. TuffNSTuff, Alex Cafarelli, Celestina Pearl, Connie Champagne, Raffle prizes from Babeland, Writing Ourselves Whole, Good Vibrations and more.

This will be an amazing event! Help support the organizations that support us!

For more for more information visit www.CUAV.org and TransMarch.org