Is it a cop out? Yes. Let’s call a spade a spade. The truth of the matter is I’ve drafted three different themes for this workshop over the past 6 months, and I can’t pin down what I’m called to teach. The truth of the matter is that I just moved my ass back to the southeast after 14 years, I’m about to start another masters degree, and I still have a full-time job. I lost my writing journal from 2020, almost threw away my grandmother's pearl necklace, and I feel like Colorado keeps trying to claim pieces of me. The truth of the matter is that I’ve been stuck in the same overly performative reading voice since my book came out and I don’t know how to get out of the rut and back into my body. The truth of the matter is that I have no idea how to keep my personal poetics alive and burning and in conversation with the right things while navigating so much change. And I want to talk about it. I want to be in process and authenticity with the glorious mess I’m currently neck deep in. I want to be in community as an honest and transparent work in progress. If that sounds like something you want to fuck with then please join me for the month of September.

Each week will cover a collection of inquiry, reflection, reading, creative prompts, and performance exercises. My goal is to hold this workshop as an open invitation and a collaboration. 

Tentative schedule: 

Materials: Pen, paper, and any art materials you'd like to work with.

My goal for this workshop, and for any work I put into community, is for it to be a genuine invitation for folks to show up at the table as their full selves. It's a simple intent with complex parts and crucial impact. My diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are founded on truth telling and hospitality. As a white queer cisgender woman, if I facilitate a space without recognizing that my body and my identity automatically create power dynamics and discomfort, I'm not telling the truth. If I let that knowledge keep me from opening the doors of my poetic home, then I am not being the hostess I was raised to be. 

I learned how to work DEI into my personal and professional practice by reading and listening to the work of BIPOC women writers and activists. Their unapologetic and gracious clarity in reframing the outdated "multicultural" framework I was educated and trained in changed my life. One such reframe that has impacted me on the daily is that the work is not about saving a seat for BIPOC folks, it is about recognizing and naming that the conversation has never been and will never be complete without BIPOC community at the table.

So my diversity, equity, and inclusion mission is to set the table. It's to make sure I have whatever I can to keep that table welcoming and expanding. To show up, take accountability when I get it wrong, and always know the size of myself in the room.