Join A Writing Community Where All You Have to Worry About. . . Is Writing

Online Writing Course for woman-identified writers from November 22 – December 20

(Registration fee: Sliding scale. No one turned away for lack of funds.)

Sad Fact: The vast majority of creative writing spaces (like all spaces in our society, really) do not prioritize dismantling systemic oppression, often defaulting to them.

Writing workshops, shows, and online spaces meant to foster community often perpetuate white supremacist, racist, sexist and ableist (among many, many others) patterns. These systems of oppression marginalize and violate instead of cultivating and expanding understanding. Our collective humanity suffers in these spaces.

The work we create therefore can end up lacking, either because of its lowered quality and general non-persuasiveness or because the creator has less access to encouragement and support and more trauma to fight through in order to create. In the end, audiences that receive work from these spaces are left with art that reinforces the racism they’ve inherited.

Another Sad Fact: Creative writing spaces that build skills around communicating across privilege are functionally impossible to find.

Mixed-race spaces often don’t address the fact that white people aren’t socialized with the tools to learn how to listen to, respect, and prioritize those who live with considerably more oppression. They also rob people of color—particularly women—of the experience of being valued, believed, and loved for who they are both by women who already understand/share their experiences and by women who historically have not.

But what if we could build creative community for women across privilege that allowed women of color to focus on writing without nervously waiting for the racist ball to drop? What if when (not if) it did, there was already a system in place to take the burden off them to stop the damaging behavior by educating their white peers while still feeling harmed?

What if those communities could both hold white women to a standard of behavior that doesn’t reinforce racist cultural standards *and* provide them with the tools to learn how to do better?

What if the spaces where we creatively engaged with each other never treated diversity as a tacked-on or secondary objective, and instead gave us as writers, visionaries, and collaborators the power to keep racial justice and progress around systemic oppression at the center of our discourse without being considered “angry” or “inappropriate”?

What if you could just. . . write?

We believe these communities are possible and within reach.

We CAN take stock of the constant failures we’ve encountered and use them to chart a new course that avoids the common pitfalls. We can discover one another without the intent of conquest, and create from there. With the right framework, learning to create together could be the most revolutionary thing we do.

Curious how we’re going to create a truly different community space? Read more here.

 

A SIX-WEEK WRITING CLASS THAT HOLDS SPACE FOR WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU WRITE

Considering the many setbacks true gender equality has faced due to white feminist fragility and derailing, we want to start by making space for women-identified folks to truly respect and understand one another across race. This is our vision for Restorative Writers.

Restorative Writers is a community workshop space for women who know that their creative practice is tied to being their whole selves and building a better world. Over the six weeks of the course, participants will engage in a daily practice of writing 50 words a day in tandem with a curriculum that will develop from “finding inspiration” all the way to owning their individual voices and visions for future work with confidence. We will use our daily practice to analyze the mechanics of great writing, learn to edit and collaborate in ways that support the writer’s intentions, and to help us understand one another through large creative risks. Writers at all levels of experience will find new challenges inside the curriculum.

The workshop/community container we’re building is, in many ways, a response to historical patterns in mixed race/mixed privilege spaces. We’ve thought about and interrogated these patterns and trends, and we have a clear picture of what our baseline “instead” is: to create a praise-filled, supportive educational environment where women, and especially women of color are free to write whatever they want or need, to express themselves in whatever way they choose.

In this space, women of color can expect to control how their work is received and the motivations of the critique they receive. In this space, white women will listen to, respect, and learn from whatever comes up in shared space without following typical patterns of perpetuating white supremacy through policing, control, critique, derailing, invisibling, etc.

We are building with the belief that:

• by virtue of prioritizing listening with honor and respect to women of color, white women can learn to discern the difference between problematic and compassionate works when it comes to inclusive creative endeavors.
• we can create an environment where microaggressions are replaced with consideration and respect by implementing new practices and standards, and by holding participants accountable as they grow into them.
• women of color are not responsible for the emotional labor or education of white women.
• creative relationships across race will facilitate true solidarity between women of color and white women, providing an alternative to white feminism that can be globally practiced.
• with tools and agreements established as community standards, white women can be encouraged to listen to what already exists and be held accountable for/capable of their own learning.
• unprecedented healing can arise from a sense of radical acceptance in mixed race spaces, overflowing into other areas of life for participants.

We will provide communication tools and methods for holding one another accountable that will help white women grow towards equitable, compassionate, considerate engagement in all of their relationships with women of color. We intend to hold our white participants as capable of a standard of care otherwise unmet anywhere in contemporary American society, and in so doing provide all of our participants with an experience of nothing short of historical significance.

Here, we are charting the course of our creative journey without co-opting or appropriating someone else’s story, without being defensive or dismissive, and without white tears. We are a space that honors the intersectionality of human existence in order to rediscover genuine connection with each other across privilege.

Let’s be clear: This is not an introductory course.

We are looking for participants already committed to the work of dismantling white supremacy specifically and systemic oppression in general, so…

If you’re not already onboard with the notion that White Feminism is toxic and needs to be dismantled, this space is not for you.

If keeping yourself safe still means not attempting intimate friendships with white people, this space definitionally can’t be a good fit for you.

If, as a white participant, you’re not prepared to be held accountable in ways that, while loving, also demand growth and self-examination that may produce discomfort, this space is not for you.

HOWEVER, if you identify as a woman and:

you’re interested in a space that will support your full voice, with all its complexities, and help you find permission in yourself to write the things you need to write (or read) …

you want to find a new definition of community and intimacy around writing, one that fuels and challenges you like never before …

after all the hair-touching and microaggressions you’ve endured, you are still somehow hoping you won’t have to keep protecting yourself from at least some white women …

you are ready to communication and accountability tools you can apply to other mixed-race spaces within your reality …

… then we would love to have you along for the ride in Restorative Writers.

If you think this is the space for you, please register here: 

Please note: in order to remain accessible to as many women who might benefit from and contribute tremendously to this workshop community, we are offering Restorative Writers at a sliding scale with no one turned away for lack of funds. If you are interested and meet the above qualifications, please register. We’ll handle course fees after that.