TRANSFORM YOURSELF THROUGH WRITING

• Grammar is magic. Idea means to be seen, to see--to make a scene.
• I will show you how to alchemize words & turn the energies around in a self-transformative life-hack. We Transform The World, One Word & One Writer at a Time.
• Scribal Practice is Written Meditation.
• I call it Scribal Therapy.
• The purpose of scribal therapy, writing with a healing intention, is to connect us with our lives, our dreams, our goals & use our past to understand our present & manifest our future. In the process, we aim to change the dominant language into a more fluent & decomputerized one.
• When we write moved by spirit, automatically, with a healing rather than a monetizing intention, we forget ourselves as who we are in daily life, leave ego & expectation & goal behind & give. We write deeper truth. We write down the light in us & we use it to look at ourselves & our lives & at those who are around us. We turn ourselves into a character so that we can look at ourselves from outside & can lighten our shadow selves. The goal is to turn silence into voice.
• I am & will be here for you as your guide to transform yourself.

1. Begin with a simple personal ritual. A chant or prayer or a song u play.

2. Set up a calm writing space used only for this writing time.

3. Breathe deeply. Empty your mind. Address your inner core Voice. Your memory bank. Exit your conscious mind to access your subconscious soul.

4. Write fast. Don't judge, evaluate, or edit what you write.

5. Recognize, counter, quiet or collaborate with inner critical voices if they pop up.

6. Stay positive as you answer the prompts. This also

creates new neural pathways.

7. Write by hand in a notebook (preferably a notebook that you selected because it makes you smile) for 8-11 minutes every day. Same time, same place, every day. First thing in the morning (before the world wakes up) or last thing at night (after the world goes to sleep). Write as fast as you can in a stream of consciousness. Don’t worry about grammar, sense, plot. Write what haunts you. What worries you. What questionable or unwelcome fears or memories have come up during the day or night & if you can say why. This is you talking with yourself.

8. At some point to be determined by us together you will burn these pages. Your relationship & your fluency with fire is as important to this practice as that of writing with pen on paper. When you’re ready (some of you will feel ready as soon as you put the pen down & others will never feel ready to let go) at some point we will choose together you will burn most of these pages. In ritual fire. You will burn them into your genetic code. You will alchemize your words. With me.

1. Describe your happy place. A place you went to as a child, or a teen, that you revisited in dream or memory because of its pure happiness. Could be a beach, an attic, a stage, a friend’s garden, a friend’s room. Try to involve all the senses. To access how it smelled, looked, tasted, felt. Its colors, its sound, the light & shadow, the mood.

2. Describe a time when u were a channel for pure creativity. When u felt led to create as a channel for divine healing energy. When u felt u served a higher purpose. When u felt that a divine plan of goodness was in place for u. When u were willing & ready to create, to let yourself create, & to let the divine create through u. When u were willing to be of service thru your creativity. When u felt encouraged to create by one or other guide. List them. List those times.

Or 3:

What do I want right now? What is my heart's true desire? Do I have any of it? Where did I get it? Is that my divine purpose? How much more of it do I want? What needs to happen for me to get more?

Date: March 21 & 22

Facilitator: Eve Eurydice

Title: Queerwrite Your Subversion!

Transform your Writing Practice with some help from Sappho to Stein, Ginsberg & Burroughs.

Location: TBD

Time: TBD

Description:

Queer writing is resistance writing by definition. Therefore, by logical necessity, it is experimental in voice & style. Queer identity is the future of gender: multi-modal, non-binary, non-normative, & non assimilative. The dominant patriarchy has no space for queer folx—no language, no morality, no gods, no pedagogy— therefore we are called to create our own by subverting the symbols & referents of patriarchy in order to define, affirm, & protect our own values.

~ Queer Femmes will be introduced to queer experimental logos through Sappho’s fragments & Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, & excerpts such as ‘Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled. (A political caricature.)’ From the word Lesbian to Steinese, we will relive the story of the birth of patriarchy around Saphic times driven by Sappho’s fame so that we can understand how language was shaped to regiment & censor the lives of millions of women; we’ll then fast forward to Stein’s times & fame to land the arch of that history that we are now called to turn around. (We can also touch on the few women writers who became known in between.) We will read & de-read together & then respond to prompts that we can begin in workshop & refine in our own practice at home.

~ Queer Masculinity & its literary & cultural expression will be introduced & analyzed by focusing on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl & William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch fragments. Howl shows writing as politics; this anti-formalist beat & jazz anti-war Whitmanesque political poem was written at a time when sodomy was a crime. Naked Lunch answers to the political rally cry by presenting the cut-up decoupage method for queer practice. Both Ginsberg & Burroughs were my creative writing teachers at Naropa, though Burroughs briefly since he was a visiting professor. I saw how their queer identity affected their avant-garde writing practice & their politics. Today, LGBT folx forget that queer politics, i.e. non homo-normative, anti-assimiliation choices, are central to a queer identity that resists a ‘passing for.’ We will sample & experience these texts together & generate your own writing using mother lines & methodologies from these texts.