This is our monthly Shiny! speculative writing group letter. Our first regular letter! I’ve been thinking about who we are as a group, and what we’re trying to do, and the obstacles that we might need to navigate.
I decided on magpies, because I love magpies.
They are inquisitive, curious, and creative. These are skills we need in this group, as we explore and investigate the complexities of the present in order to imagine more hopeful futures.
And they are forever seeking out the shiny hiding in the gutters and the trash and the deepest, thorniest thicket. We need this skill, too. The little bits of sparkle that we find together in this group will help us build nests for the future. (It is important to note that magpies aren’t actually more drawn to shiny objects more than any other bird – if you are a sparrow or an eagle or robin or a turkey vulture, you, too, are valuable and necessary and you, too, will help build the nests to hold the future.)
And magpies are brilliant and adaptable – recognizing the faces of allies and threats, using tools, adapting to hostile contexts. Magpies are one of the species that have fully adapted to urban living, and that thrive in spaces that have been fundamentally altered by human intrusion. This is another skill – to adapt, to recognize threat and to thrive despite it. (And perhaps to swoop at the heads of a threat, like Australian magpies do!)
So, my lovely magpies, let’s dive into this letter.
You’ll find the craft lesson first, then shared writing from the February session, some recommended reading, the writing prompts for March.
Craft Lesson
Shiny! is open to writers of all experience and confidence levels, and the reason we are not engaging in craft lessons at our in-person meetings is because, although ‘steering the craft’ (to borrow from Ursula K. Le Guin) is important, first we must be invited in. First, we gather up our words and our threads of story. First, we learn the sound and feel of our own voice. That’s what we’re doing in the in-person writing sessions. Once we have gathered a rich pile of words and stories, then we can figure out what to do with them.
Then we learn how to string those words together in ways that are most effective, and how to use our voice in ways that are most accessible to our audience. That’s what we’re hoping to do in these craft lessons.
You do not need to engage with these craft lessons in order to participate in either the in-person or the online group. They are entirely optional. However, if you do decide to engage with the craft lessons and would like to chat about them or receive feedback on your work, you can bring them to the group or email them to me. (We will eventually have a dedicated online space, most likely a Discord server, but since this is all volunteer on my end and I’ve got a bit of a learning curve to get that set up, we don’t have it yet. Bear with me!)
So, our first craft lesson!
We are starting with dialogue, since this was one of the requested topics at our launch party in January.
One of our participants shared that they have lots of character sketches and settings and narrative ideas, but they struggle with how to write dialogue between these characters.
This was a shared experience for many of us!
There are whole books written on the topic of writing dialogue (including a wealth of books on screenwriting, which offer insights that can be translated over to other forms of writing). Many of us speak all the time – to each other and to ourselves. We play over conversations in our minds, remembering or rehearsing. We listen to other people engaging in dialogue, too. We are surrounded by dialogue!
But it remains challenging to write, partly because we are so immersed in conversation throughout our days, and what we write on the page sounds off if it is exactly like what we say and hear throughout the day. Our writing needs to capture the feel of conversation, and that means that we need to learn which parts of spoken conversation need to be cut away in order to leave the core intact and convincing.
Here are a couple exercises to work with:
Practice rewriting dialogue
Record yourself having a conversation with a friend. This works best if the conversation is about something, so that you have some clear themes to work with. I suggest recording five minutes of rich conversation (which may mean setting your voice memo recording and then chatting for twenty minutes, and choosing the richest five for this exercise).
Transcribe those five minutes of conversation.
As you’re transcribing, pay attention to all of the filler in the conversation, and all the bits that could be edited out in order to make the dialogue easier to read.
Once you’ve done this, rewrite the conversation. Keep the core of it – the meaning, the flow, each person’s separate voice. Work on shaping that dialogue into something that reads smoothly but remains true to the actual conversation you had with your friend.
Dialogue or description?
(This exercise is adapted from the book Writing Dialogue by the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto.)
Put two characters in a setting where they’re stuck together. (The book recommends a car, but I’ve also found waiting room, plane ride, or ticket line settings useful.)
Write the same scene twice, once using only dialogue (what are the characters saying to each other?) and once using only description or summary (what is happening around the characters?)
Which works better?
Why?
That wasn’t the plan!
Write a two-part scene.
In the first, have your character imagining what they will say in a conversation that they’re anticipating.
In the second, write them actually having the conversation.
We’ve all had the experience of anticipating a conversation and then having that conversation actually happen, and it rarely works that it goes exactly as planned. (When it does go exactly as planned, this is its own kind of shocking!)
If your character’s conversation does not go as planned, what are the variables that push the conversation off the anticipated track? What is the result of this?
If the conversation goes exactly as planned, what is the outcome of this? How does your character feel? What are the effects on their life or the lives of those around them?
Shared Writing
One of our writing prompts was rolling three Magic & Fairytale Story Cube dice. We got a wizard, a treasure chest, and a knight. Agnieszka wrote three haikus, and has allowed me to share them here.
The Wizard
Cloaked in patient leadership,
They stand with courage
An alchemy of wisdom
The Knight (for Tiffany)
The pursuit of truth,
Through deepest sorrow of loss,
Your shining armour
Treasure Chest
Oh, the joyful abundance
Of being open
To the beauty of pleasure
Links
If we are going to, as Walidah Imarisha suggests, write “fantastical literature that helps us to understand existing power dynamics, and helps us imagine paths to creating more just futures,” then we must be actively and intentionally working to decolonize, to be actively anti-racist, to be working towards justice. And I think that if we want to write good speculative writing, in any genre, we also need a sense of hope and possibility – sometimes our efforts towards justice, especially if we are writing from a place of privilege and trying to be in solidarity, can feel stripped of playfulness and joy. I think we need to find that joy. Our selected links for this month are tied to these ideas.
With the colonial violence being enacted against Wet’suwet’en by the Canadian government, knowing what is happening and how to be in solidarity is important, even if our writing is on other topics. These big moments in our collective narrative are important for speculative writers because in these moments, possibilities for other ways to be in the future open up. So our first link is not related to writing speculative fiction, but it is related to our goal of imagining more just futures. The Wet’suwet’en Supporter Toolkit offers a wide range of ways to support, including links to further resources. As you read through this, what becomes possible in your writing? Does the history shared here, and the story of resistance and resilience, change how you might write possible futures?
Our second reading is Kate Heartfield’s article at Article Magazine, Decolonizing the Future: How a new generation of Indigenous writers is changing the face of science fiction. This is a beautiful read, full of recommendations for books and articles and to read, and clearly articulating why Indigenous science fiction is so important. One thing I love about this essay is that it makes clear that Indigenous communities have been imagining possible futures for themselves that have always stood against colonization, and have affirmed Indigenous rights. Written a couple years ago, I think that this essay is a beautiful pairing with the Supporter Toolkit – the land defenders are holding the future, and Indigenous speculative writers have been imagining that future into possibility. “The concept of “the future” only exists in the present. It can be shaped by the same colonial structures and narratives that shape the North American present, or it can affirm Indigenous land and sovereignty.”
Our third reading is for those of us who want to write, and may not be sure what stories are ours to tell, and how to tell them in respectful ways. Amal el-Mohtar offers a brilliant and comprehensive answer to the question, “How can writers represent people on the margins in their stories? How do writers know when they are being allies and when they are talking over people who could be speaking for themselves? How can I tell, as a writer, when I’m telling a story that isn’t mine to tell?” It can be found in her essay, Writing the Margins from the Centre and Other Moral Geometries.
And lastly, the joy and playfulness, and how friendship makes the future possible. Read more from Amal el-Mohtar in her story Pockets, at Uncanny Magazine. The thing I love most about this piece is how it demonstrates what friendship can mean – the care that Tessa and Nadia and Warda take with each other, the way they check in about what they each need… it’s beautiful. It reminds me of some of my own friendships, the ones that make it possible to stay in this world even when the world is hard and terrifying. The friendships are my favourite thing about this story, but I also love the pockets!
In addition to the readings, I have an announcement!
The Spring 2020 round of An Unexpected Light is open for registration! Participation is limited in this six-month online narrative therapy and speculative fiction course. Shiny! is an offshoot of the first round of this course, which has been really well-received! If you’re enjoying this group, you might enjoy the course, too.
You can find out more (including a link to download the updated syllabus) here.
Our next in-person writing session will happen on March 1, 2020, from 4-6 pm at Loft 112 in Calgary, Alberta. We’ll be writing on the following prompts (probably not all three, unless we are a very small group!) Since our craft lesson this month was dialogue, our writing prompts are loosely themed around communication.
Shiny! is explicitly a speculative writing group, but “speculative writing” can encompass a vast diversity of genres and styles. Whatever you write, keep an eye on the speculation of it. What are you imagining to be different than what is currently known of reality? And Shiny! is also an explicitly justice-focused group, hoping to write our way into more just, more liberated, more possible futures. So if the dread rises up in you and the only future stories feel dystopian, reach in for your inner magpie, wise and adaptable and possible, and find even the tiniest sparkle to grab onto. Bring that sparkle into your story.
If you will be attending the March event, you can choose whether to write on these ahead of time and then polish them at the event, or write another piece on the same prompt at the event.
If you’re following along at a distance, you can write along with these prompts and share them by email if you’d like them included in next month’s letter. To write along, set your timer for 20 minutes and write! Feel free to edit and rewrite or keep writing past the timer, but also don’t feel obligated. Sometimes it’s worthwhile just to get a little bit of writing done, even if it’s not perfect or complete.
“I trust that help will come eventually if I persist in my curiosity, my investigation.” – Susan Power. Write about the help that comes to your character, and about the curiosity and investigation that made it possible.
A hand-written note from another time. (Note, you can take this in many directions – a note found in a book far in the future, a note sent to the past via time travel, a note from or to an ancestor, a note never meant to be found and discovered somehow, etc.)
(An earlier draft of this post was available to Patreon supporters.)
cw: death
Yesterday was the Winter Solstice, and it was also three weeks since my dad died.
It was a hard day. It has been a hard three weeks. It was a hard stretch before that. It has been a long night, and the night is not over. But the light returns. I know that the light returns. I know that even in the darkest night and the deepest gloom, there is light.
The stars exist. And some of the stars that light our night skies are many centuries dead – still, they glow. Legacies of light, a physics of remembrance. I think that there is something like this in grief, too. A way of light continuing.
And there are fireflies and other bioluminescent plants and animals. Lights in deep gloom. In the further depths of dark ocean, in the forests, in the wide open spaces that can feel like endless empty. There is something like this in grief, too.
There is always light, somewhere. There is always light returning eventually. Sometimes it just takes time to travel to us, for us to travel to the light, for us to find a way to glow, for the small and precious glowing thing to show itself. The long dark is hard, but it is not forever.
I’ve been reflecting on the legacies that my dad left me, the legacies that I want to continue.
I wrote to my friend about the memories of my youth and my feelings about my dad. Hugh said that, in reading my letter about my dad, they could see that he gave me “part of the thing we need most in this world: a sense of urgent justice.”
And this is true. When I think about what my dad gave me, and what I cherish most in myself, it is that sense of urgent justice.
This urgent justice was, in its best and most cherished expression, justice tied to love. Justice tied to acceptance. Justice tied to empathy. Justice tied to an awareness of power and privilege, and an intentional choice to side with the marginalized.
I saw my dad express this justice tied to empathy and awareness of power many times in my life. Those stories have been close to me these last few weeks, surfacing again and again. Luminescent.
In the week after his death, when I was updating An Invitation to Celebrate to include him, and to invite people to celebrate the life of a loved one, I wrote –
“He taught me to always watch for the hurting people and to connect with and care for them. That’s still how I live my life, and it’s my favourite thing about myself. It comes from my dad.”
This is justice.
This is the urgency of justice – to watch for the people who are hurting, to connect with them and to care for them. Justice and love are tied together, braided into a strong triple-strand with the hope that justice and love can light the path to something better, something more possible.
My small Solstice ritual included writing my dad a letter – the first letter I’ve been able to write him since he died. I told him that I love him, that I will not forget him, that he was good and worthy and that I will hold onto many of the things he taught me. I named the threads I will hold onto:
a sense of urgent justice
a deep appreciation for the power of good story
a commitment to compassion and acceptance
These are some of the lights my dad offered me. Lights that are still in my sky.
And every light casts a shadow, so along with these lights I acknowledge failures and complexities. Actions that align with injustice, stories that cause harm, cruelty and rejection instead of compassion and acceptance. These shadows were present in my own life, and in my dad’s life and in our relationship, but they do not cancel out the light. Part of how I will honour my dad is by holding the light, and not denying the shadow.
What those failures and ruptures and omissions, those shadows, offer is the invitation to return to alignment with values of justice, good story, compassion, acceptance.
Fail, and return.
Fail, and choose to come back.
Fail, and then breathe, cry, grapple with guilt and shame, and return again, again, again.
I did not include this in my letter, but it is also true that another legacy I will carry forward from my dad is a deep value of connection. In this, too, we both failed and returned, failed and returned.
I wrote this two weeks ago –
One week since dad stepped out of this story and into another.
I woke up at 4:30. I set an alarm. I didn’t want to sleep through it, to sleep through the slipping from the first week to the second week, to sleep through marking and remembering those ten minutes between when Domini woke me up and when dad slipped away.
I had a plan for the day, to get through this day. It was a pretty good plan, I think.
But I got the wind knocked out of me before I could do it, knocked off the plan, smashed hard into a wall I saw coming but still somehow didn’t expect. Maybe just didn’t expect the timing of it. Didn’t expect it this morning, like that.
I went swimming instead.
Dad and I used to swim at the same pool – Vecova. Helped my fibro, helped his pain, too. We crossed paths a few times. Not enough.
I have spent the last hour reading old emails.
‘Hello my first born, you know, I hope, that I am proud of you. I miss you.’
‘Hi dad, haven’t heard from you in a while. I miss you.’
‘Good morning, Tiffany. I sometimes feel that you and I are growing further and further apart and I do not know how to counter that.’
‘Hey Dad, how are you? I miss you. I love you!’
‘You have no idea how much I miss talking to you; working on a treasure hunt for you; and just being able to connect with you. Even though you are a fully realized adult and are demonstrably moving forward I still think of you as someone who, at one time, counted on me to help you work through some of your issues. I wish that were still the case.’
‘Hi dad, I know you’re probably busy but I thought I’d try again. How are you doing?’
We both tried so hard, for so long.
We both wanted something different.
We were both reaching and reaching and reaching and not quite getting there.
It is hard to read these emails, each of us repeatedly reaching out, somehow not able to get past the missing and find connection.
There is a deep ocean of grief in me, for what we had and have lost, for what we wanted and were not able to find, for what was painful between us, for what was precious between us.
It is a very hard day, today.
Despite how hard it was, we kept trying. We valued connection – we both valued connection with each other – enough to keep trying. To keep coming back.
And I will carry that with me, the knowledge that continuing to try holds value, and that even when it isn’t perfect, it is good and worthy.
I lit four candles for the Solstice.
A black candle for the grief, the loss, the long dark.
A green candle for justice, and for the growth that comes from aligning with justice.
A red candle for love and compassion and empathy and acceptance, the sparks that tell justice where to focus, how to grow.
A white candle for hope and renewal, for the willingness to fail and come back, for the light that we can turn to, phototropic, moving towards what is good and life-giving.
You may have noticed a new addition to the top menu, a link to the page for An Unexpected Light, the speculative fiction and narrative therapy course that will be launching on October 1. As of August 15, all of the scholarship spaces are filled, but there are still 11 paid spaces available and negotiating an extended or alternative payment plan is totally possible.
This post is a copy of the email sent out to people who have either enrolled in An Unexpected Light, or who have signed up to my Thinkific site. You can do either of those things here!
Dear Phototropes,
Phototropism, first defined in 1899, is the mechanism that causes plants to orient towards light. (I anticipate that our journey together will include both the phototropism of turning towards the light of hopeful stories, and also the bioluminescence of creating our own hopeful stories.)
So, welcome!
First, a little teaser of some of our content (which I’m hoping will inspire you to enroll, if you haven’t yet, or to let your friends know about this course!)
In the lead-up to the course starting on October 1, I’m going to share some of the great writing that didn’t make it into the syllabus, and some writing about texts that are in the syllabus.
First, Susan Jane Bigelow’s story A Memory of Wind, in Glittership (so you can listen to the audio or read the text).
I didn’t include this story, although it would be a great fit for when we’re working on memory in month 4. But I loved it, so I’m including it here.
Second, this video about Janelle Monae’s science fiction. Although this video was made before Dirty Computer (which we’ll be watching as one of our texts), the points about how she uses music, dance, and costume are all super relevant to the later video. I didn’t include this in the course, but it’s also worth a watch!
And now, the question.
The first two of the textbooks have arrived, and I am thrilled! Octavia’s Brood and Funambulist no. 24: Futurisms are in my hot little hands, and Witchbody is waiting for me at Shelf Life Books. The only one we’re waiting on is Variations on Your Body, which I anticipate receiving within a week or two.
This means, of course, that folks who have signed up early can get their textbooks early, too! As soon as all four are here, I’ll start mailing them out.
So, if you have already enrolled in the course, let me know, dearest phototropic readers and bioluminescent writers, whether you would prefer to receive your textbooks in physical or digital format. If you would prefer your books in physical form, please also send me your address.
Lastly, if you have any questions, especially if you’re on the fence about whether to enroll, please let me know!
And if you can think of anywhere that I should send information about the course, or if you know anyone who might be interested, I would love to hear that, too.
I’ll be sending out a few of these messages with teaser content as we approach the course starting on Oct. 1.
One goal is to generate excitement for the course, another is to share some of the delicious content that didn’t fit into the course, and the last is to start getting some feedback from you about what kind of content most resonates, so that I can tweak the course before it starts.
Image description: Top panel, angry cat. Bottom panel, small flower growing beside a heart. Text reads: self-care group part two: anger and hope. one week facilitated community care group. Oct 8-14. sostarselfcare@gmail.com to register.
The first round of the self-care group was a success.
The news has not gotten easier, so we’re back for another week of daily check-ins, two group chats, and one in-person coffee for the Calgary folks.
The goal of this group* is to collect our skills and insider knowledges – those ways of surviving, caring for ourselves and each other, navigating hard times and deep injustices that we have learned – and to share those with each other. To create opportunities for connection, to foster solidarity and a sense of agency and action, and to hold space for the many different true stories of our current experience. Our hope *and* our anger. Our despair *and* our resilience.
You can participate in this group even if you don’t ever share anything. The opportunity to share is there, but there is no expectation.
You can expect narrative-informed questions to invite you into exploring your own story, links to resources, cute pictures, and some overly wordy rambling from me.
This group is open to anyone, regardless of location.
Register by sending me a message here, or an email at sostarselfcare@gmail.com.
Participation in this group is by optional donation.
* There is another goal, which is this: I have switched my focus for my major project in the Master of Narrative Therapy and Community Work program. I will still be working on narrative therapy and polyamory, but for now, I am going to focus on how narrative practices can help us navigate this current political context. Keep an eye on the Facebook page and this blog for event updates.
If your news feed is anything like mine, it is a rough Monday morning. I couldn’t even get through half the political news before I felt like giving up and going back to bed. I know I’m not the only one.
And I know that I have shareable skills.
And I know that YOU have shareable skills, also!
Let’s put those skills together and keep everybody afloat.
So, I’m going to try something new for this week!
If you’re having a tough time, send me a message with your email address.
I’m going to run a one-week self-care survival group, starting today.
We’ll have twice-a-day self-care check-ins, a group chat twice this week, and one Calgary in-person meet-up (though you’re welcome to participate from out of town, also!).
For those of you who participated in the 3-week self-compassion course last year, this will follow a similar format in terms of checking in with each other, and I’ll also be drawing on my narrative therapy training for this.
It’s a Full Moon tonight, it’s the only week in the next long while that I don’t have any assignments due or big events on the horizon, and the news is terrible – perfect timing to pull a new project together.
Participation in this group is by optional donation.
Good morning, friends and supporters and new acquaintances!
This is our monthly review/preview post. These posts are one way that I keep myself accountable to my patrons (and my own goals), and they also offer people who might want to participate in my ongoing collective projects an opportunity to see what’s going on.
March was a busy and rewarding month – I spent three weeks in Australia, attending the Advanced Narrative Practices teaching block for my Master of Narrative Therapy and Community Work. It was an incredible experience. I really felt like I was at home with my colleagues – I felt like I fit in, and that what I had to contribute was welcome in the space. There are a bunch of collaborations simmering, and I feel like the choice to do this Masters program, even with the cost and stress, was the right one.
Now, the projects! I’m going to try a new format for this post, with the goal of prioritizing my collaborative projects and welcoming new contributors.
So, first, open calls for contributors and participants! These are the projects that are currently in process and open to participation. If you want to get involved, get in touch with me! You can email me, find me on Facebook, or be involved by supporting the Patreon. I do most of this work without any funding or financial gain, and my patrons make that possible.
Extroversion and Mental Health – This project has been percolating for a while, and the initial interviews have been really exciting. My goal for this project is a multi-media resource with validation and support for people who experience themselves as extroverts and struggle with doing self-care and managing challenges like depression, anxiety, or suicidality. The reason this project feels important is because so much mental health content seems to assume introversion, and so many cultural norms equate extroversion with resilience and strength. The multi-media piece is because the extroverts I’ve spoken with so far have consistently commented on video and audio being easier to engage with than pure text, so I’m branching out my resource generation skills and I’m going to learn how to do video! And audio! It’s going to be exciting. Do you want to get involved? I am interested in talking with folks who identify themselves as extroverted (sometimes or all the time), and particularly folks whose extroversion intersects with marginalized identities or neurodivergences – autistic extroverts, fat extroverts, depressed and anxious extroverts, BIPOC extroverts, and all those other folks whose bodies and selves are excluded, dismissed, or expected to be quiet. (This project will overlap with the Quiet Crew collaboration, which you can read about further on!) You can participate online via a skype or text interview, in person in either one-on-one or (if there’s interest) group interviews/conversations, remotely by sending me your thoughts on the topic freeform, or by answering a questionnaire (which isn’t designed yet, so if that’s your pick, just let me know and I’ll get that put together!) I will also be looking for folks who want to do audio or video interviews or segments.
Financial Self-Care Under Capitalism – This project is well underway now, and I’m in the process of arranging interviews, collecting questionnaire responses, and figuring out what this project might look like in its final form. What I am picturing right now is a multi-part project – a downloadable PDF resource (my specialty!) and an ongoing Tumblr project, Nopenomics, that you can read about further on. If you want to participate in this project, we can chat online or in-person, you can send me your thoughts freeform, or you can answer a questionnaire (which has been created, so it can be in your inbox today!). I am particularly interested in hearing from people who are struggling financially, and I am not going to be creating a “stop eating avocado toast” resource – this is meant to be an exploration of how we survive under the abuses of capitalism, and how we resist the harmful individualizing narratives around money that often ignore the structural issues and injustices that so many of us our dealing with. Issues of intergenerational poverty and financial disadvantage, which are so real for Black and Indigenous folks, and also issues of chronic underemployment and housing insecurity, which are so prevalent for many trans and queer folks, will all be acknowledged. This resource is meant to be an honouring of the ways in which we on the margins weave our thin threads into safety nets to keep ourselves and each other alive, and the ways in which we use our money in ways that may not make sense within neoliberal middle-class economics, but do help us keep our heads above water enough to get a gasp of air.
Self-Care for Queer Geeks – This is the resource that accompanies the March Possibilities event. Since I wasn’t at that event, and it was a small event (it was actually only Scott!), I’m collecting interviews and insight from a wider audience. If you identify as queer, and as a geek, I want to talk with you! I’m interested in how we navigate geek spaces – fandoms, video games, groups, etc. – and in how we find and support and create and engage with queer-inclusive content. How do we take care of ourselves, how do we take care of each other, and how do we subvert the heteronormative, trans antagonistic, and misogynist toxicity of many geek spaces. (I have also reached out to Avery Alder to ask if she’d be willing to do an interview for this resource, but she is a busy person so I don’t know if it will work out! If there are other creators you think I should reach out to, or that you can connect me with, let me know!) Opportunities to contribute are pretty standard – in person, online, freeform, or answering a questionnaire (which is in process now and will be ready to send out by Monday).
Feminism from the Margins – This is the project launched last month with my amazing friend Dulcinea Lapis. We’re looking for contributors who want to speak back to the cis white feminism that was so glaringly on display in many International Women’s Day events. This is a year-long project, and we’ll be posting each month, on the 8th, as a way to extend the IWD conversation both in scope (including more marginalized voices, such as trans women, women of colour, non-binary folks, sex workers, and others) and in duration (lasting a whole year rather than contained to one day). I put up the April contribution on the 8th – it’s an open letter to marginalized feminists by Michelle Dang, and it is fantastic. We are still looking for contributors, so if you’re interested, get in touch!
Getting Through the Bad Gender Feels – This is another project that is just starting to gain some momentum. I am interested in speaking with anyone who is trans, non-binary, two-spirit, or otherwise not cisgender (though I do also wonder about including some of the bad gender feels that can happen even to cis folks – am on the fence, and open to your thoughts). If you’d like to contribute or participate in this project, let me know! I’m still working on what format it will take, but I’m starting to collect ideas, interviews, and information.
And then, upcoming events! Here’s where you can find me, online and in-person.
April 8. Sunday morning is the Self-Care Salon! This month we’re talking about self-care for professionals on the margins, and my guest presenter will be Jonathan Griffith, a queer lawyer specializing in family law. We’ll be meeting at Loft 112, from 10:30-12:30, and this will be a special brunch event. (Keep an eye open for the May salon on May 6, it will be part-two in the 3-part series I’m presenting with Pedrom Nasiri, and next month we’ll be talking about polyamory for marginalized folks.)
April 17. Our monthly Possibilities meeting. This month, we’ll be talking about Self-Care and The Closet. We’ll be talking about dominant narratives about the closet, and all the ways in which the closet is complex – it can be oppressive but it can also be freeing, and there are many ways to approach the idea of closets and coming out. At the narrative therapy teaching block, I had the honour of meeting and learning from Sekneh Hammoud-Beckett, whose paper “Azima ila Hayati – an invitation in to my life : narrative conversations about sexual identity” introduces the idea of “inviting in” rather than “coming out,” which can be more culturally resonant for the Muslim youth that she works with. If anyone wants to read this paper ahead of the event, let me know! And as always, I’ll be generating a resource following this conversation and you are welcome to participate in that conversation whether you attend the event or not.
April 23. Trust and Attachment is the latest online course offering, and I am SUPER EXCITED about this course! You can read all about it at the link, but the deets are these: starts April 23, runs for 6 weeks, costs $150 (with sliding scale available and a discount for Patreon supporters). This course grew out of the Bridges and Boundaries course that ran earlier this year, but you do not need to have taken that course to take this one. Register by letting me know that you’re interested!
And now, here are the collaborations and projects that are either theoretical, in the planning stages right now, or coming up in the next month. Many of these ideas were hatched at the teaching block!
I’ll have three assignments due in the Masters program in April – two reflections on readings, and one project outline for my year-long practice innovation project. I have no idea what that project is going to be, but I have many ideas about what it might be. As always, I’ll post my papers for patrons to read.
I’m organizing a sustainability for narrative practitioners group on Slack.
I am coordinating a Dictionary of Delicious Failures collective document. This will involve a bunch of folks (and I’ll be organizing an event in Calgary in May, so keep your peepers peeled for that). Julia, one of my classmates, will be coordinating a similar event in Nepal, and Trina, another narrative practioner, will be coordinating an event in Denmark. Other folks might also join us, but those are the three that are planned.
The Quiet Crew is a group working on bringing together stories of quiet resistance and activism, and challenging the perception of quietness with social anxiety. I met up with one of their members while I was in Adelaide, and we are excited about potential collaborations (particularly when it comes to this project and the extroversion project being two sides of a similar coin – assumptions made about identity based on behaviour).
The Nopenomics Tumblr. This doesn’t exist yet, but it will. A Tumblr open to submissions about all the ways in which we resist, challenge, subvert, fail, and struggle under capitalism. I’m hoping to have a Tumblr + a quarterly zine!
Another classmate would like me to send her 20-ish words that are particularly relevant to the LGBTQIA2S+ communities and she’s going to work with her communities in Mumbai to translate them into three Indian languages. This is part of a project exploring culturally specific experiences of queerness, and it grew out of a conversation she and I had after I collaborated with four of my classmates (all amazing people) to host a presentation and conversation on Judith Butler and gender. You can see the influence of these conversations in the upcoming Possibilities event, and I’m excited to expand my practice to include more awareness of these culturally-specific experiences.
Julia, a classmate and new friend, and I are going to keep in touch regarding mistakes and harm in narrative practice, since we’re both interested in learning how to avoid them (and we’ve both experienced fucking up, haha). Julia, for the record, is just lovely. I am so glad to have met her. She’s also the person who drew the picture of my London Fog octopus, which I shared with patrons in March!
Rosie, another classmate and new friend, and I are … I don’t even know, there are at least ten different potential collaborations. We’re going to keep in touch. They’re going to contribute to the Bad Gender Feels project, for sure, and we’re also considering some kind of trans-continental gender project, bringing their group into conversation with Possibilities and the queer community in Calgary. (Get it? TRANS-continental? Oh my god, I’m hilarious.)
Cheryl White is working on a project about finances, and we’re going to talk about whether her project and my financial self-care under capitalism project might have some collaborative potential. (Cheryl White is one of the core thinkers within narrative therapy, and is the director of the Dulwich Centre and just all around an incredible badass. I really hope this collaboration happens!
Gipsy (the daughter one of the faculty) and I are going to talk about a potential collaboration between the crip crew in Calgary and her Invisible Disability Warriors here in Adelaide. This was a result of me mentioning that I have a few clients dealing with chronic pain or long-term illness, and wanting to find a way to support them better, and Rosie getting super excited and connecting me with Gipsy. We’ve been in touch, and the first stage of this collaboration will be her sending me the video and booklet that her group of ME/CFS and Fibromyalgia folks have created, and then myself and some other folks in Calgary will create an “outsider witness response” document. This is a narrative practice that I learned in Adelaide at the teaching block, and I’m excited to try it out. The second stage of this collaboration might be the Calgary group creating our own booklet and video, and sending it back to Gipsy and her community.
Two of my classmates have trans clients that they’d like help supporting, so both of them will be getting some extra support from me on that – mostly I’m going to send them articles and books to read, but they also wondered if I’d be willing to chat with clients and I said yes. (So, my patrons are supporting me in helping create trans-inclusive therapy settings around the world! I would really love to get involved in more of this kind of work, so I’m hoping that these first two efforts go well.)
And last, but absolutely not least, I’m applying for a Student Engagement Grant from the University of Melbourne, and the project that I’m applying with is the Well, This Sucks project with my sister! (I bet you were wondering where that project would show up in this post. Or maybe you weren’t. But I saved it for last because I am so excited about this!!!!!) The grant application is due April 15, and I’ll be posting my drafts for patrons. 😀
Curious about that project? Check it out:
From the email I sent to David Denborough, when first floating the idea of applying for the grant –
Well, This Sucks. This is a project that I’m collaborating with my sister, Domini, to coordinate. It’s meant to be, in its final form, a collection of “pods” of information for various demographic groups with information on responding to sexual trauma. It was born out of our experience of responding to an assault, and then over the year that followed, tripping over all these gaps in available information and represented voices. We saw a lack of resources for the men who are partnered with people who have been through a sexual trauma, particularly straight cisgender men who are often excluded from most conversations about how to do the emotional work of support. We also saw a lack of resources for more conservative parents who don’t know how to respond or what to say, and end up either saying nothing or falling back on victim blaming narratives. And a lack of resources for supporters who are survivors themselves, navigating the complexity of that. (And that was just in our very immediate circle.)
Then we started looking a bit outside our circle, once we were through the very immediate experience, and realizing how many other voices are missing from so many conversations about this.
What we’re picturing is a web portal that guides people through a series of questions and lands them in a pod of information and resources that is generated collectively by people who share some of their identities or experiences (so, video content and stories from straight cisgender men to welcome other straight cisgender men into a supportive role, and stories and video from men who have experienced assault to create space for other men who are going through the same thing, each in their own pod of information, and so on). The reason we decided on pods was because Domini and I have very different communities – Domini is doing her feminism within more rural conservative communities where issues of queerness, gender, and justice require different language (much more “inviting in” than “coming out” in those spaces!), and I do mine within urban, political queer, trans, and feminist communities that have very different languages and cultural norms. We decided not to try and meet in an uncomfortable middle, but rather honour the diversity of these two very different spaces, and create content that shares a goal of supporting communities following an assault, but doesn’t demand that everyone use the same language or approach the issue in the same way. This was especially important because often the language and norms from my communities is framed as being “better” or “more progressive” than the language and norms from Domini’s communities, but in lived experience this is not always the case. Social justice groups may have all the “right” language, but sometimes they are deeply lacking in compassionate support. Our worry was that if we tried to use language that would feel inclusive of my communities, it would end up feeling alienating for Domini’s communities, and we would lose all the rich insight and experience of folks who can’t speak the Social Justice Warrior dialect and are more “rough around the edges”. (And we also just wouldn’t be able to help them.) So, multiple languages!
Anyway, what I thought for the grant was maybe creating one of the pods! I know that Domini would be keen on the one for straight cis men who are supporters, and that might have some interesting overlap with the masculinities project, too. (I’m partway through reading Michelle Dang’s paper on community responses to sexual assault and she and I will be talking about this project, too!)
I am most excited about this project because my sister is amazing, we’ve been in the planning process for almost a year now, and I think that when this project gets going it is going to be really great. But I’m also somewhat hesitant about it, because it’s huge and it will require a lot of skill, intentionality, and strong supportive partnerships willing to keep us on track and call us in when we fuck up. It’s like… 73% excitement, 21% apprehension, 6% terror.
Reading this again, I realize that I use a lot of exclamation points. Ha.
DD wrote back and said that he thought this project would be a good fit, so we’re going ahead with the application, and we’ll be generating the content for the pod focused on cis straight men who are supporters/partners of assault survivors. So there will be a call for contributors going out once this is underway!
And that’s that! These posts go up early for patrons (and sometimes never make it onto the blog – sorry, February/March!). There’s a lot happening, even more than is listed here, and I’m excited about it!
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