by Tiffany | Jan 22, 2025 | Reading, Relationships, vlog
Last week’s video included a review of Rebekah Weatherspoon’s cowboy romance, A Thorn in the Saddle, and a discussion of why I think reading romance novels (or other media that helps us imagine beyond the stories that are most often presented to us) is important.
A Thorn in the Saddle is the third book in the Cowboys of California series, and it’s a lot of fun, and I think it’s doing something really interesting when it comes to how communities and families can respond to inappropriate behaviour in loving and restorative ways. It’s really good!
In adrienne maree brown’s essay on love as political resistance, in her book Pleasure Activism, she writes about how we need to learn how to love, and how this is something we learn in relationship. I think romance novels are one place where we can learn better ways to love, and where we can learn to imagine love outside of dominant discourses. Any community that you most often see represented as struggling, suffering, excluded, traumatized… if you can’t remember the last time you saw a story about someone from that community thriving, loving, and being loved, I think it’s worth seeking out romance novels by and about them.
I think now, even more than before, we need to be able to witness and imagine trans joy, immigrant joy, Black joy, Indigenous joy, queer joy. Things are really hard, and going to get harder, and I’m not at all suggesting that we pretend this isn’t the case or that we turn away from the material effects of hardship and injustice. I just think that it can be sustaining and generative to also seek out the stories that help us remember that another world is also possible, and that people are never just the hardest moments in their lives.
by Tiffany | Jan 10, 2025 | Personal, Reading, vlog
I’ve started a weekly(ish) book review vlog! I record the videos and then Joe edits them. I’m pretty excited about this project. When I took the train to visit my sister and Elliot last year, I kept a little vlog, and I did the same when I went to Australia for the first time.
Joe gifted me a vlogging camera for my birthday this year, and set up a PeerTube instance for me, but I didn’t manage to keep going with the vlogging. But now we have a plan! And it’s a team effort, so hopefully that will help me keep up with it. The first two videos are up. In episode 1, I reviewed Cat Sebastian’s queer historical romance, You Should Be So Lucky.
And in episode 2, I reviewed Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, and gave a tour of the Lego Botanical Gardens set, which I built with Joe while listening to the book.
We’re hoping to release episodes every Wednesday. I’ll post them here and on my Patreon. (The Patreon also gets monthly updates! And supports my unpaid community work, such as the disability peer group, and the trans and non-binary narrative practitioner peer groups, which I continue to run every month. Maybe you want to join?)
by Tiffany | Sep 18, 2024 | Collaborations, Downloadable resources, Gender, Identity, Intersectionality, Letters of Support for the Trans Community, Writing, Zines
A collective document about caring for trans community
Collected by Tiffany Sostar following community conversations and consultations in 2022 and 2023.
Download the 49-page PDF here.
From the document:
This document is, at its heart, about caring for trans community. This care might take the form of quiet friendship, vocal advocacy, public support or private support. It might be as simple as using someone’s pronouns or as involved as advocating for policy change. These actions of care might be understood as solidarity (though you’ll find some reflection on the limits of this framing in this document). These actions of care might be understood as compassion, companionship, connection, as movements towards justice and liberation, as love. They might be personal and private or very public.
This document is about actions of care, whatever they are, however you understand them, towards and with and within trans community, by which we mean, the vast expanse of gender expression and identity that is not cisgender (cisgender is when the sex you were assigned at birth aligns with the gender you know yourself to be).
We are sending this document out into a world that is increasingly hostile to trans community, especially to trans youth, trans women, racialized trans people, and disabled trans people.
This hostility is not new, and no injustice exists in isolation. Hostility towards trans community has always impacted different groups in different ways at different times, and always intersects with other systems of power and control.
Legal protections only go as far as other hostilities allow.
We hope that one action of care that extends from this document and these conversations is an interest in and invitation towards connecting with trans communities across difference, finding each other and caring together.
There are so many communities, including trans people who are racialized, who live in rural contexts, who are incarcerated, street involved, or otherwise disconnected from structural supports and “legitimate” trans identities and experiences. These are communities that governments fail to serve, and that have been left or pushed out of queer spaces.
In times like these, I think we can lose connection with the reality that trans folks and our allies have been supporting each other’s mutual existence forever. And maybe it’s hope-building to know that communities that have had less structural access have developed a richness of resources and conversations, skills and knowledges, networks of mutual aid and care to support one another in getting our needs met. There’s possibility in connecting to and working to strengthen these mutual aid systems because maybe this loosens our attachment to institutions and strengthens our connections to each other.
I hope that disconnected communities will be motivated to repair or build connections, and allow us to orient ourselves towards the movement, honouring the work, knowledges, and lineages in these communities. I hope we can remember that our liberations are collectively bound, and that this isn’t the start of something new but it is an opportunity for connection.
– Aakhil, contributor
Trans community includes people from every community. Every community includes trans people.
This document is a collective action of care extended from everyone involved in this project to every trans person who may come across this document, and we hope that it invites you, beloved reader, whoever you are, to join us in caring and in being moved to action by that care.
“Bearing witness to how many people want to do right and want to make active change and be supportive, it does inspire hope.”
– A contributor, about reading this document. We hope you feel the same.
This document has been shared in the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work. You can also hear an audio practice note about its creation and our hopes for the project here.
by Tiffany | Dec 28, 2023 | Business, Groups, Narrative therapy practices
In January, February, and March of 2024, I will be trialling a new peer group offering for narrative therapy practitioners.
This new group will run on the first Friday of each month, and is a re-imagining of the ‘narrative peer consultation’ group that ran consistently from spring 2020-summer 2023. If there is interest in this, we’ll continue!
Instead of the 90-minute consultation format, this revised event will include:
- a 60-minute consultation group, where participants are welcome to bring a topic they’re interested in, and I will have a topic prepared as well, and we’ll discuss whatever the group is interested in,
- a 15-minute break,
- a 60-minute practice session, and
- a 15-minute wrap-up and reflection.
The practice session is the big change! And I’m really excited about it – I’ve now had the opportunity to both participate in and facilitate live interviewing practice sessions, and it can be really helpful to do narrative work in this way – to practice the questions, figure out how to recognize openings to alternate stories, hear how other people phrase questions, and experience being on the receiving end of questions. I appreciate how live practice has something to offer practitioners at any level of comfort and familiarity with narrative practice.
I decided to add this to the structure for the group because there are folks I have connected with recently who are newer to narrative practice and might want additional practical support, and there are other folks who have expressed an interest in reconnecting with narrative ways of having conversations – the actual maps of narrative questions, becoming more confident in how to ask narrative questions, etc.
The practice session will include live narrative interviewing, and I will have a few narrative question ‘maps’ available, or participants can practice particular types of narrative conversation, such as re-membering, absent but implicit, or freeform. This is an opportunity for practitioners at any level of experience to either practice narrative questions, experience narrative conversations as the person being interviewed, or witness a narrative conversation.
It is a total time commitment of 2.5 hours.
The consultation group will be recorded and transcribed, as was the routine established in the earlier iteration of this group. These transcriptions are such rich sources of local knowledge! The transcriptions will be shared only with group participants.
The handling of the practice session will be determined by the participants. If the interviewer and interviewee agree, the session will be recorded but not transcribed, and session participants will have the opportunity to download the video for themselves within a week of the session. The video is not to be shared beyond the participants. If the interviewer or interviewee prefer not to have the session recorded, it will not be recorded.
Participation requires registration ahead of time, and there is a $20-50 sliding scale fee for this event. (If you support the patreon, you’re covered!)
These events will run as long as there are at least 5 participants registered 48 hours before the event runs. If there are not enough participants registered at that point, I’ll cancel the event.
The three scheduled conversations are on the first Friday (first Saturday in Australia) of January, February, and March – Jan 5, Feb 2, and Mar 1.
The schedule is Friday, 3 pm-4 pm mountain time for the consultation group (this is Saturday, 8:30-9:30 am Adelaide); 4:15-5:15 pm practice group (9:45-10:45 am Adelaide), then 15 minutes for reflections and wrap up.
You can register here.
Note that you’ll need to register for each month’s event separately.
If you have any questions, get in touch!
by Tiffany | Dec 4, 2023 | Online courses, Writing
I’m revising The Light Returning for 2023, with brand new prompts, and in a new format on Thinkific.
This online course runs for the last ten days of the calendar year, and is meant to invite participants to reflect on and share their 2023 stories. The good ones and the bad ones, the soft and the hard ones. My hope is that this course will help weave a more complicated, nuanced, richly described tapestry of the year, one that we can look back on and find ourselves in, not as passive recipients of collective trauma but as people with hopes for ourselves and our communities, with skills to navigate hard times, and with agency.
If you participated in this course in 2020 or 2021, you know it is pretty low-key – there’s an optional virtual ‘opening ceremony’ on December 20, and an equally optional ‘closing ceremony’ at the end of the course. In the past, this course has been email-based, and participants received an email every morning. This year, I’m hosting it through Thinkific, and you’ll have access to all of the prompts when the content becomes available on December 21. You’ll maintain access to the content indefinitely, so you can work through it at whatever pace works for you.
We’ll have our own Discord server (available to participants) and I’ll be active in there throughout the course, so even though I won’t be in your inbox like I have been in previous years, I’ll still be around and reachable!
From the welcome section:
One goal of this course is to give participants a way to feel connected to community over a holiday season that, for some of us, can include tension, disconnection, and a feeling of alienation. This stretch of time between the solstice and the calendar year turning over can be a hard one. There are a lot of expectations, a lot of dominant discourses about family and what it means. There can be expectations about availability for in-person, indoor events that may exclude those of us who are still covid cautious. Some of us re-enter (by choice or not) a ‘closet’ during this season for our own safety or because our whole selves are not welcome. Some of us experience significant harm and hardship during this season. Even for those of us who are not experiencing distance from family for political and practical or pandemical reasons, this can be a hard season. Grief hits harder when the world is telling you you’re supposed to be celebrating. This course is meant to provide a counterweight to the heavy drag of those expectations and contexts.
Another goal of this course is to explicitly name collective grief, climate crisis, and colonial violence as core parts of 2023. This is important to me because 2023 has not just been about individual struggle, but it has felt increasingly individualized. How can we bring a sense of collectivity into our 2023 stories?
A third goal of this course is to not only welcome the light back, but to actively turn towards the light – to be phototropic [1] in our own lives.
In this third goal, we don’t just “focus on the positive” to the exclusion of naming and honouring what has hurt, what has been unjust, what has been unbearable. But I do want to suggest that how we tell our stories influences how possible it feels to live our lives.
My hope for us is that we can begin to uncover and give language to the legacies of action we have joined in this last year, the contributions we have made to the lives of others, the care and connections that have kept us tethered to our hopes, our dreams, our lives.
In turning toward the light, I also want to invite course participants to stand against the stories that so many of us have been told about ourselves that do not offer a sense of possibility or hope. I want us to wrestle those stories back from the racist, ableist, cis-hetero-patriarchal capitalism that has attempted to steal them from us.
These are our stories.
They are so much more rich and complex than the thin stories handed to us by people who do not value our lives.
[1] Phototropism is the response of a plant or other organism to light, most often seen in plants turning towards the source of light in order to sustain themselves. I love this metaphor for so many reasons, and in my own life it has been helpful to think of all the many times I have turned toward the light in order to sustain myself – holding onto my values as a source of light, holding onto my hopes as a source of light, reaching out to my community (sometimes only in my own thoughts, but still turning towards them). Like that meme says, “you’re basically a houseplant with complicated emotions” – I find this so heartening.
The cost is sliding scale, from $10-50.
Register for The Light Returning here.
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