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!

get brave

(from some visioning for 2010: I'd like to post more consistently here at the writingourselveswhole blog, and one topic I want to communicate about is this process I'm entering around growing the workshops into something more like a nonprofit. I never saw myself as someone who would start an org, and have a lot of 'inner critic' stuff coming up about these new steps. I want to be transparent with these voices, with my response to 'em, and more...)

Remember that writing prompt, "If I were brave, I would..."? Here's one of my writes in response:

If I were brave, I would sell my work: hold to the excitement and joy about it and share that with others. If I were brave, I would want some hope. If I were brave, I would talk about the work, I would go dancing, let myself sing, I would open hard, I would let the love happen, I would expect that the joy will keep happening, I will let myself and us fly, I will remember what words and writing can do, I will remember what words and writing can do. I will remember what words and writing can do. I will dive open. If I were brave, I would write my press release. If I were brave, I would then MAIL that press release to people, media outlets. If I were brave, I would ask for help. If I were brave, I would accept what's offered. If I were brave, I would ask to be interviewed on radio shows. I would get public about my work, about the workshops, about upcoming collaborations, about what words and writing in community can do.

What if you were only thinking about what you needed and wanted (untempered by what others say or think is possible)?

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

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.

thinking about the narrator

As a certified Amherst Writers and Artists workshop facilitator, I use this structure for all of my writing workshops:
1) keep all writing offered in the workshops confidential
2) offer exercises as suggestions
3) remind folks that sharing is optional
4) respond to all writing as though it's fiction and with what we liked/found strong

Now, the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops that I facilitate (survivors writing workshops and erotic writing workshops) often end up, at least for many (but not all!) participants, being 'life writing' opportunities workshops, where the writing is a telling of our own stories, getting into that thick truth of the everyday stories we exist within.

As a facilitator (and as a writer) I am interested in making/having opportunities for us to tell the whole truth(s) and so at first when I am going through the Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) practices with a new group, I describe the way the method holds space for all this openness: you get to write whatever you want here because we keep it all confidential, and you get to do the exercise or not do the exercise whatever you want, you can even write about how much you hate the exercise and you can read it or not and if you read we only say what we like and what’s strong...

and then scratch screech wham I feel like I’m pulling on the breaks around all that freedom (although that's not the case). The piece that can be the most challenging for folks new to the AWA method is the part where we talk about all the writing as though it’s fiction. Unless instructed otherwise by the writer, we talk about the narrator and the characters in the piece (rather than saying 'you' to indicate that the writer and the one written about is necessarily the same).

Initially, this can feel like a confusing irritation. I sense folks cringing under the weight of one more thing to remember and how do you talk about fiction anyway what if I do this part wrong?>

I take a deep breath. I say, this is how we talk about it – we don’t know what’s fiction and what’s nonfiction – we don’t need to know.

This is what I want to talk about: the wording matters. How we talk about something matters.

There’s a space enacted when I talk about your story in the 3rd person; there’s a different intimacy, in a way: slightly less immediacy, more distance, which, when we’re handling something raw and electrified like brand new writing        is a good and useful thing.

We offer each other risky stories in these workshops – and in most writing spaces. We need to be tender with each other in response. This guideline is part of the tenderness, the way we set a structure that creates a space for enormous risk: we won’t tear it down, and we won’t tie it to you. We won’t point at you while we are talking about it.

Here’s the other thing that happens – if we have made fiction with our stories, suddenly we are strung up on the line of It All Has To Be True when someone refers to the “you” from the story as fact        we all know there is a difference between facts and truth…


One more thing? Talking about the piece of writing as though it's fiction gives us as peer writers and respondents the chance to forefront and acknowledge our lenses. There’s room for each of our interpretations. If I have written a story about some situation between, say, my sister and I, and to many people it sounds sad and I am trying to find language for the joy in a difficult moment, response to that piece will likely run a gamut from “I felt the happiness they got to have at that difficult time” to “they were so sad and that was really strong for me, came through really clearly.” When someone 'misinterprets' me when I am speaking, especially in response to something intimate or personal or painful, and I feel the need to clarify, to correct. Within this structure, though, I have the freedom (the gift!) of hearing multiple interpretations of my telling – I get to hear multiple readers’ responses, what they hear in my writing, what they bring, too, to their hearing. I don’t have to take it personally – it reminds me that every reader (including editors – and friends/lovers/parents!) have a lens, bring what they’ve experienced to a story.

There’s a working space that gets opened up around us when one person puts her words in the room and then all of us, the writer included, gets to look at those words as a bit detached from the writer herself. We get to turn the story over, allow response to all of its angles, aspects, curves, undersides. Often, I picture the story as a silvery-malachite ball floating next to the writer: we all get to enjoy this creation for what it is, exactly as it is, expecting nothing more from it (even if we didn’t want it to end while we were listening).

For me as a human subject, it’s difficult to be examined, responded to this way – I get a little prickly and nervous, even if all the feedback and words I hear I know are supposed to be ‘good’ and strong – still there’s a discomfort, more

In a way, talking about the new writing as fiction objectifies the work in the best way, highlights its status as an artistic creation as opposed to a confession, and allows us as writers and as listeners to experience the distance between who we are and how we tell it; this part of the structure also holds the separation between writing group and therapy group. These workshops are not therapy groups. We are creating art while we put language to difficult or new or exciting or scary or sexy or socially-unacceptable truths.

What happens in that in-between space, the transformation of memory and fantasy into words and onto paper, is sacred, and talking about a work as though it’s fiction protects and honors that space and that artistry in all of us.

Your turn: How is it for you, if you've participated in an AWA workshop or facilitated such a space -- what's your experience of the 'fiction' part of our practice?

Prompt for a Monday...

Give yourself 15 minutes.

Grab a notebook, step away from the computer. Take yourself outside, or at least close to a window. Think of an unfinished conversation -- from this morning, from this weekend, from last year.

Could be an conversation between a couple characters you're working with! Let yourself go back there, dive into the dialogue, beginning with what you wanted to say...

Prompt for a Tuesday: Conversation among our "selves"

It's Tuesday, and I dunno about you, but I am already well into my week, and the "self" that I am on the weekends feels further and further away by the minute.

Here's a prompt for this morning:
Take a few moments and write down all the "selves" you are in your life right now (or maybe create this list for a character you're working with!). (For instance, my list might include: commuter, database flunky, writer, dreamer, coffee addict, etc.)

Let yourself notice which two of your "selves" take most of your time right now, or are otherwise calling your writerly attention, and let them talk with one another for at least 15 mins...

(Please feel welcome to enter responses to this prompt in the comments!)

'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.

Listing: one more of the tricks of the "trade"

I had such a great experience writing in response to the Arts and Healing network interview questions over the last several months -- and I was also, finally, motivated to regularly update this blog.

So, at 6:30am while I was working on my morning pages, I jotted down some more questions I'd like to answer (or begin to answer!) about my work, the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops, the uses of art, and more...

It ends up tricking me into posting more regularly -- we've got to do what we determine will work to get us around our blocks and internalized naysayers, don't we?

So, here are some of the questions I'd love to explore in more depth:

Why don’t I call what I'm doing 'therapy'?

How do silences/silencings in one area of our lives affect the rest of our lives?

What’s the psychological/social effect of transformative writing in community?

How does trauma change the way we “know” things, and then how does art both accommodate and help to reshape that new knowledge/way of knowing (ontology?)

How do we get started with transformative writing?

What does art, experiencing and creating art, do to our brains?

Why would anyone want to write about sex in a group of strangers?

What do people who’ve been in the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops have to say about them?

What’s the difference, psychologically/neurologically, between the creation of visual and verbal art?

How can writing be a spiritual practice? What’s our definition of “spiritual practice”? Does it need to be a spiritual practice? Can writing ever not be spiritual?

Reconsidering 'recovery' - tangling with the voice that says, "I want to get back to where/who I was before this happened."

These are some of the questions tickling the inside of my brain these days, and getting them out there in front of you provides me with some more impetus to actually tackle them.

I've had a lot of my old cognitive science interests re-emerging recently, in particular around the neurophysiology and social/sociological effects of trauma and of trauma recovery through transformative writing (in particular -- though any expressive art, in general).

What about you? What questions do you have about the writing experience, about expressive or healing arts, about Pat Schneider's Amherst Writers and Artists writing workshop method, about erotic writing, or...? Please let me know -- and we can add them to the list!

Podcast with Arts and Healing Network is up!

The podcast that Britt Bravo and I recorded back in Nov is up on the Arts and Healing Network! Just before I got on the road to head down to LA for Thanksgiving, Britt and I talked transformative writing, writing as a healing practice, expressive arts, erotic writing for survivors of sexual trauma, Pat Schneider's Amherst Writers and Artists workshop method, and more!

Of course, as always, I'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions? What did I leave out? What's true for you about these topics?

Jen Cross of Writing Ourselves Whole on the Arts and Healing Podcast http://artheals.libsyn.com/

Direct download: Jen_Cross__Writing_Ourselves_Whole.mp3

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.