**Updated: Season 1 is now 4 sessions instead of 6, and is now open for individual session drop-in at $25/class. See details below.
Do you remember your first experiences of using writing as a tool to digest life?
When I dream into this question, I see my teenage self at my grandparents’ house, watching the birds. My journal held my words for me in sacred confidence as I wrote my first poem. The birds helped me connect with the inner despair I was feeling, while simultaneously connected me with the mystery of life. Writing that poem changed my relationship with life; in choosing my own words about my own real feelings about life, I discovered that I was living with life.
About 30 years later I would be sitting in a writing circle small group, doing very much the same thing, but out loud: I had found live humans to hold my words for me in sacred confidence. Reading my words of raw emotion out loud to a few other people in a small room was uncomfortably vulnerable for me, and, was also extremely empowering. That first writing circle changed my relationship with life, yet again.
THE LIBERATED WORDSMITH
We need places and spaces to hold our words, to offer containers for the discovery and sharing of our humanity. Beginning in February, my friend Jameka Alexander and I will be offering such a container in our Liberated Wordsmith Series, hosted by The ReMember Institute.
The Liberated Wordsmith on line (zoom) series invites writers of all levels of experience to take part in these 6 week themed seasons, where you will be held within a consciously created container designed to give space for authentic reflection, writing, and sharing.
Impact Statements from Participants:
“The Liberated Wordsmith was an experience in connection like no other I’ve had as a writer. The group practices and community traditions are designed to create a supportive, open, nonjudgmental space, and participants come with open hearts. I highly recommend. LWS was tremendously healing.”
“I feel inspired to write more and use the practices I learned in the circle, especially non-judge mental fast writing.”
“Liberated Wordsmith is a mindfully built and heart healing space that encourages everyone to show up in their fullness and write who they are with space to be and grow. A must attend event for sure.”
In this masterfully co-created community…
- we will have time and space to contemplate and write
- our voices and stories will be heard
- we will choose what feedback to our writing we receive
- our creativity will be inspired and honored
We will be drawing on various practices, lineages, and traditions, including from Women Writing For (a) Change, Bloomington Indiana and The ReMember Institute.
Our first series, The Rise & The Fall: An Exploration of What Births From Death, begins February 19th, and is coming at the perfect time.
From the series description:
We are coming off of a couple of intense years: the tangled layers of the Covid 19 pandemic, the forced confrontation of ourselves amidst quarantine, the exposure of the systematic killing of Black and Brown people within violent and broken systems and institutions, and the loss of millions of lives. As we are grieving and grappling with the breadth and magnitude of those losses, personally and globally, we are invited to connect with what is available on the other side of death, not as a loss, but as a catalyst for creation. We are rebirthing and reconnecting with ourselves and discovering evolutionary possibilities and growth opportunities within ourselves and in our communities.
In Season 1 of Liberated Wordsmith, we will be centering Black and Brown authors who elucidate the themes of the rise and the fall and explore the creative potential found in the cycle of birth and death. We will connect with selected literary and poetic excerpts, quotes, and consciously crafted writing prompts that reflect and uplift these themes as we engage with and honor our experiences through our writing.
Jameka and I look forward to holding courageous space that will include the presence of the somatic system, fostering a ripe fertile ground for co-creating and co-discovering. While we will be exploring through writing, you do not need to be a writer to experience the depth of this course. Please send questions to LLMEUSER@ME.COM
**Updated: Season 1 is now 4 sessions instead of 6, and is now open for individual session drop-in at $25/class
Scheduling Details: 8am-10:30am PST
- Session 2 February 27
- Session 3 March 5
- Break
- Session 5 March 19
- Session 6 March 27
Which Includes:
- 4 live interactive zoom-based writing workshop sessions, 2.5 hours each
- basic student access to ReMember Institute’s private social media platform, including a personal profile
- access to the Liberated Wordsmith Community Group on campus
About us:
J.B. Alexander is an incredible force of love, sensuality, and wisdom, she is a multidisciplinary artist whose creative and poetic work seeks to connect with and illuminate the core aspects of self, sexuality, and shadow. She is is the author of a collection of poetry titled, a poem, that explores all topics from love to grief, as well as you’ll probably never read this, a work of literary non-fiction that is a personal exploration of love, sexuality, and self. J.B. Alexander uses her writing practice as a way to delve into the depths of shadow to exhume the light.
Lisa Meuser supports people in journeying with their somatic intelligence/energies of their psyches and beings- through the traumatic and oppressive realms to the realms of abundance and liberation. Lisa is a Conscious Feminine Leadership certified writing circle facilitator. As a somatic therapist, she utilizes writing as a self-discovery and transformational tool in her private practice, Integrative Healing. Lisa a full-time student of being fully human and is deeply passionate about playing and navigating with creation in empowering ways.
