Our goals

These Workshops let us use writing to explore our inner multiplicity. We have three goals:

• 🙌 To support each other’s writing practice,
• 🛠️ To develop our craft, and
• ❤️‍🔥 To pursue healing and liberation in community.

Quick links

👋 Weekly Workshops. Times, Zoom link, folders, format

📝 Writing for the week. Some gentle guidelines for your practice

💬 Preparing for your Workshop. How to read other folks’ writing

💡Soft prompts. A new suggestion for your writing every week

👋 Weekly Workshops

Times, Zoom link, and writing folders

We meet every week over Zoom (here’s the link) in two Workshops:

• Thursdays at 12pm Central (10am Pacific), with writing shared on Mondays in this folder.
• Sundays at 10am Central (8am Pacific), with writing shared on Thursdays in this folder.

Workshop format

In our hour together, each of us will answer these three questions:

1. What was it like for your systems to write and share what you did this week? We’ll all answer that question, one after the other, passing to the next person. The order in which we speak this time is the order we’ll keep for the next question.
2. For each person’s writing, in the same order: What one to three specific features of this writing interested your system? These are the features you noticed as you prepared.
3. As we wrap up: What does your inner world want or need from your writing in the coming week? This final question sets us up for the writing we’ll do next.

📝 Writing for the week

Every week, I’ll give a “soft prompt” for our weekly writing right here. Your system will decide how to interpret the prompt in language. Here are some guidelines:

• The deadline for sharing is soft. The intention here to give all of us two full days to read and interact with everybody else’s writing. If you aren’t able to share your work by the appointed time, feel free to share it anyway, any time you like before we meet. Those of us who have a chance to read and comment on late-arriving work are certainly welcome to do so (and likely will), but we may not devote any Workshop time to discussing writing that came in after the deadline.
• Limit your weekly writing to 1,000 words or less. (We may sometimes agree informally to some other limitation on a given week, but this is the general rule.)
• There’s no need for content warnings, but you can certainly give some direction at the top of your writing if there’s anything other participants’ systems should know. (“Might be scary, so maybe don’t read before bed,” for example.)
• You can share your writing to your group’s folder in three ways: put a Google Doc in the folder, drag a Word document into the folder, or email it to me and I’ll share it for you.

💬 Preparing for your Workshop

Before our weekly Workshop meeting, we all read, interact with, and reflect on each other’s writing, with the healing and liberation of all systems in mind. Some gentle guidance:

• Read in whatever way is most comfortable for your system, printed out or on the screen. (To print a Google Doc, just open it up and then select File > Print.)
• If you read on screen, feel free to comment directly on someone’s writing. (To comment in Google Docs, highlight the text that interests you: you’ll see a little prompt to add a comment on the right. You can also highlight text, then select Insert > Comment.)
• As you read and ponder, remember: this group is about exploration, not critique or “improvement.” A rule of thumb: focus on how your system reacts to the writing as it is, rather than offering suggestions for how the writing could be different.
• Let your system’s reactions help you identify one to three specific features of each person’s writing that you’d like to tell them about when we meet.
  • Those can be anything: a specific word or phrase, a notable stylistic choice, an interesting metaphor, a moment of recognition, a new question you have now that you didn’t know how to ask before.
  • You might like to jot those things down as you go (whatever “jotting” means to you) so you can remember your initial reactions clearly during the Workshop.

💡Soft prompts

We’ll decide on weekly prompts as we go, and I’ll update this schedule accordingly.

Any questions? Just get in touch with Ash. And thank you very much for being part of this experiment in writing community!