Her Own Tongue

a 7-week Gateless Writing salon
for recovering an embodied language

(co-ed, woman-centered, lgbtq friendly)

Tuesdays, 6pm - 8:15pm ET, December 5th, 2023 - January 16th, 2024*

*(6 salons + 1 at-home prompt during Christmas break week)

Limited to 8 participants

“Turn the blood that clots your tongue into poems. poems.” — Lucille Clifton

“All writers must be creators, but women writers must create twice: we must re-create our materials — the very words and word-patterns of our medium — and at the same time we must create our individual pieces of writing.” ~ Marilyn Sewell

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About this theme:
Her Own Tongue

In a Western culture that values facts and figures over eros and the invisible (all that which cannot be quantified such as emotion, ecstasy, and pain) culturally we have lost an embodied language, a poetic tongue, to communicate the actual substance and life-force of our lives. This is why many women are often silent when pressed to speak, because within a masculine, rational language there are no words to communicate the wordless, ineffable feelings that swell within us.

We have to create those words — we have to learn how to pull the invisible into our language, to write in metaphor and images that are big enough to hold our joy, our suffering, and our yearning. This itself is a practice of “becoming”, of helping us to more fully inhabit the marrow of our everyday lives. And since words create worlds, writing in an erotic tongue is also a way of writing the feminine into being, of feeding a current of soul in a dried up, soul-thirsty world.

“There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling… The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. - Audre Lorde

In this series, with the help of the embodied poetry of women writers such as Lucille Clifton, Audre Lord, Denise Levertov, and others, we will experientially learn and practice embodied writing that is rooted in the raw and real of our everyday lives. (Please note, these salons will not include formal writing education, only experiential-learning through hearing and being inspired by the embodied poetry of these writers).

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Gateless writing is a writing method inspired by Zen Buddhism and creative brain science to support you to drop beneath the conditioned critical mind into the “river beneath the river” — the non-rational source of wisdom beyond our literal minds where all creativity springs.

We cannot force creativity, however we can recreate the most fertile conditions that creativity naturally flows from. This involves leaving our ‘above world’ ordinary state of consciousness (the linear rational mind) and entering a non-ordinary, subterranean state. In Gateless we do this with the help of guided meditation, authentic movement, music, and incubation, as well as through creating a safe, critique-free atmosphere. In Gateless methodology we only give and receive supportive feedback about what we genuinely loved and appreciated about each other’s writing so that your creative-genius-inner-child can frolic in the fields of experimental play, free of the fear of judgement.