Restorative Writers is an educational collaboration between writers Princess McDowell and Tatyana Brown. Together we intend to facilitate creative spaces that prioritize anti-racism while supporting growth in confidence and craft for all participants. We believe that trusting relationships built with integrity across racial privilege lay a rich foundation for complex, compelling art and lasting social change.
(Click here to check out our bios.)
Why We Do What We Do:
You’re probably quite familiar with this map:
It’s called the Mercator Map, and in 1596 European sailors began using it to navigate the seas for trade and conquest. Since it’s such a simple image—with lines of latitude and longitude laid out in a perfect, regular grid—it is still one of the most popular maps for teaching geography in schools. There’s only one problem: our planet does not look like this.
On the map, North America appears gigantic. In reality, that entire continent is small enough to fit inside the land area of Africa. Twice.
The Mercator Projection’s distorted image of Earth’s surface served a specific purpose: to help European colonialists easily navigate oceans, mine resource like land, riches, and human lives and expand the empires they represented. That purpose made colonialists rely on images that were bent enough to serve only their needs. But these visual distortions lead to psychological distortions on behalf of the viewer.
As descendants of this history, we have all been taught to see warped versions of reality, forcing us into a mapped world that benefits only a select few while inflicting incredible harm on us all.
The Mercator Projection is just one of the many tools that invisibly hold white supremacy, cis-sexist colonialism, patriarchy, classism, ableism, heterosexism, and other forms of systemic oppression in place. We’ve inherited flattened-out, so-simple-it’s-painfully-inaccurate versions of a complex and rich world. And when we use the tools given to us without questioning their architecture or historical context, we perpetuate these traditions of injustice.
As writers, when environments that are meant for our growth and development (workshops and community spaces) perpetuate these distortions, our work cannot help but be compromised. We create from an inherited crisis of imagination—unless we break away from the conventions holding white supremacy and systemic oppression in place.
Sharing your work, asking for feedback and support as we reach to bring our creative visions into reality, and showing up to thoughtfully engage with other writers is vulnerable, life-changing work. We believe that doing this work in a context that holds all participants accountable for prioritizing the voices of women of color (as well as other people with severe lived experiences of oppression) and dismantling white supremacy can lay the foundation for infinitely more nuanced and engaging art and stronger relationships.
We also believe that this process of exploration will help us to draw new maps—for ourselves and our future readers. And when we reshape our vision of reality to reflect equity instead of imposed hierarchy, world-changing action will get a lot easier to sustain.
Interested in joining a writer’s workshop for women-identified folks that upholds these values?
