"Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.” ~Toni Morrison
Visceral Self | Writing Through the Body: Week Eleven | Begin | "Can I Turn It Into A Poem (Or Poem-ish Thing)?
Upcoming WITD Events
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🕯️TONIGHT June 12, 8 PM CT, Candlelight Yoga Nidra (founding)
🎤 Fri June 21, 1 PM CT, Celebratory Live Solstice Salon w/open mic (founding)
📝 Thursday, June 27, 5:30-8:30 PM/ CT Live Class on Zoom: The Feeling of What Happens: Advanced Techniques for Writing That Stirs Emotion
Join us TONIGHT 8 PM Central for our LAST beautiful candlelight yoga nidra of this Visceral Self intensive for embodied writing! You don’t have to have been writing in the intensive to join. Zoom link sent later today—upgrade to founding here for this and all the other juicy founding member events. As Sarah Fay says, “Writing in the Dark is such a value. You’re basically giving people an MFA in creative writing for practically nothing.” Plus, we’re pretty fun to hang with. So, join us!
Welcome to Week Eleven of The Visceral Self embodied writing intensive! Next week is our last Wednesday of embodied writing together. To say I’m moved is an understatement. It’s been beyond incredible. And we’ll announce the next seasonal intensive for paid members soon, as well as details of our synchronous, multi-session live-on-Zoom Writing in the Dark starting fall 2025. We hope you’ll consider joining one or both. We’re going to write so hard. Stay tuned.
And even if you haven’t tried writing with us yet (like, dipped your toes into our amazing comment threads and shared your work), we want you to bask wherever you are for as long as you want until if/when you are ever ready for more.
Meanwhile, I’m going to ask for an indulgence, and I’m grateful in advance. I need to share what a writer said this week in response to my essay on the outsized power of child narrators (i.e., why you should try one, even if your final draft won’t use one). Her words lifted me right up when I really needed it this week (you’ll hear about why I needed it in a second).
These indulgent words from a WITDer helped me scrape myself back up from a fall:
I am truly gobsmacked by what a brilliant teacher (& writer) you are.
While I have never been enrolled in an actual MFA program, I have taken multiple classes, seminars, workshops, programs, video modules & the like over these last years, spending thousands of dollars to try & learn the craft of writing &/or simply to inspire my writing practice (which I know are not one and the same). Most of the containers were live (online). Twice, these have included editorial components. While I received something valuable out of every experience—be it new to me information, creative habit-building, community, inspiration, or cheerleading—not a single one can claim the level of craft expertise that we all receive here with you!
While my current life’s landscape has prevented me from participating at the level I anticipated I could, I have still gratefully been able to soak up a mind-boggling treasure trove of knowledge on craft. On top of this, I love it so very much! Writing in the Dark has introduced me to new skill sets, authors, poets & brand new (to me) techniques like the use of constraints, plain language, the external world, braiding & so on. Your analysis of the child as narrator & what they offer distinct from the adult narrator is just off the charts epic in what it opens up for me.
And since I’m shamelessly gushing anyway, I will not leave out the community you’ve built & nurture with such attention, empathy & personal specificity. I know it would not be the stand-alone diamond mine I come to scour as often as time permits without you creating the conditions for thriving. Thank you for who you are & all that you teach, share, inspire & create here. ☺️
What I love about these words is more than the accolades—though I love those, too. But most of all, I love how this writer describes exactly the kind of creative community I’m striving to build: rigorous but warm, challenging but lively and fun and not overly serious or off-putting, welcoming to beginners but also a clear call to action for experienced writers to stretch harder in new ways, difficult ways, even after they’ve been writing for decades, and, last but not least, a community where you can show up just as you are, give what you can— sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes nothing—and always be welcomed and valued for yourself (as long as you’re not being mean—we don’t do mean here).
Again, thank you.
Now for what follows in the rest of this post:
1) my recent writing setback; 2) a momentary flash of embodiment on a dock in Mexico; 3) our Week Eleven embodied writing materials, including a belter of a poem by Kim Addonizio, 4) a close reading that’s also something of a call to action; 5) our Week Eleven meditations and embodied writing exercise.
Enjoy Week Eleven! I can’t wait to see you in the comments!
The setback. It’s not a huge deal—a thing that feels bad but isn’t anyone’s fault. Sill, I reeled when saw a project announced with many identical elements to a writing project I've been loosely and very s-l-o-w-l-y working on and talking about here and there, as I do. Seeing this other project threw me hard for about a day and a half, mostly out of frustration with myself. Why am I so slow?! I said. But the truth is, I can’t work any faster right now. Since Z’s arrival two years ago in our family, I’ve had to rearrange my priorities to support Billie and him. That’s how this machine works (thanks, Ada Limon).
I work the longest, hardest hours I am able to, and there’s no way I could have worked any faster on this particular idea. There is no solution whatsoever but to shake it off by doing the exact things I would tell anyone else to do.
First, I reminded myself that heartbreak is part of the deal, as Eric Kaplan reminds us in his Five Theses on Creativity. But the deal includes love, too—and I’d rather focus on love:
Thesis No. 5: Creativity is a kind of love. That’s why it can break your heart, and why, at the same time, it can make the world come alive. When you’re creative, you make things fresh and new; when you love someone or something, you do the same.
I reminded myself that ideas are just ideas. They don’t exist until if/when we manifest them—until then, ideas are just like children, in that they do not belong to us. Adapting Gibran’s “On Children,” we could say, our ideas “…come through us but not from us / And though they are with us yet they belong not to us.”
This helps. Thank you, Gibran.
I reminded myself, too, that I can and very often do adapt and revise my ideas in inventive ways—life has taught me how! I can do that again.
Finally (and probably most importantly), I reminded myself that only I can ever write in the exact way that only I write. That doesn’t mean I write better than anyone else, but I do write singularly as myself. That’s not nothing!
I share this with you so that if/when you have creative setbacks and disappointments and even heartbreaks, you can tell yourself whatever it is you need to hear to get back up and start again, with enough joy to make it matter.
Thanks for listening. I am grateful for all of you every damn day.
A dock story. We’re talking mid 1998, the summer
turned three. We took a family vacation in Mexico, one of only two times my then-husband, father of my three children, and I flew together with all of them. We didn’t have much money, so vacations requiring five (!!) airline tickets and oceanside weren’t typical. What was ? Well, mayhem. I was editing a parenting magazine while unschooling our kids. It was as wild as it sounds.On the personal side, I was trying, that summer, to get strong with Cindy Crawford’s Shape Your Body workout videos. I felt silly donning my workout gear in our small first-floor study and lunging along with Cindy, but I liked the way my muscles were speaking up to me in a fiery new language. My then-husband made fun of the whole Cindy Crawford thing, but he made fun of most things. Humor was his language, the tonal dial of which turned from positive to negative in direct response to his general happiness level. In this era, he was what you could call less happy. To note, we were edging into the final year of our marriage, but neither of us knew that then. Not consciously, anyway.
But as you might imagine, many things happened during that two-week trip to Isla Mujeres with extended family. We visited the ruins, as people often do in that area. We rented golf carts, as ditto. During one golf-cart expedition, my then-husband got cranky—vacations unsettled him—and during the apex of his bad mood he leapt from the golf cart and parked himself on the dirt near the edge of the desolate cliff overlooking the sea, thereafter refusing to budge for what seemed like forever. As the other adults stood around nonchalantly, trying not to look uncomfortable, it seemed to me, my embarrassment burnt hot. Back then, I was still too easily embarrassed by things out of my control. Or maybe my embarrassment stemmed directly from my lack of control.
Anyway, we also spent those weeks doing lots of things outside our normal routines, that much is certain—like dashing around the island in taxis without enough seatbelts for the kids. I put it out of my mind, even though my mind was generally fixated on various forms of risk reduction. What good could it do, though, to fixate on seatbelts if none were available? We swam in the ocean a lot, so much that Billie Oh swam for the first time between my sister and me, back and forth, eyes wide with the amazement of finding themselves suddenly buoyant in the saltwater.
Toward the end of our trip, we all went out on a big catamaran named Lala, also the name of my great-aunt who (I was convinced as a child, and probably rightly so), loved me more than anyone else did. Lala died when I was ten. The young man who captained the Lala was tall and thin and so strong you could see the striations in his muscles. His long, sun-bleached hair shone almost white against his deep tan. All that day, we snorkeled off the Lala and drank weak tropical drinks and, which, since I rarely drank in those years, made me feel I was almost surely in love with the captain. The feeling persisted for days, but—just as with the lack of seatbelts in the taxis—there was nothing to be done about it. Luckily, all three kids got traveler’s sickness despite our precautions, and I was soon consumed by running with them on demand to the nearest bathrooms.
One other thing happened on Isla—a vivid thing just for me, as I sat alone on the dock jutting into the sea from the beach at our budget hotel, my brown shoulders bare against the island air, the sun lazy in the west, the voices of my children and family, and their splashing noises, in the water nearby but also, somehow, far, far away as my bare feet—also brown—crossed at the ankle and relaxed against the warm wood as my legs stretched out in front of me, strong from lunging. My arms felt strong, too, stretched down and back behind me, and not just from Cindy Crawford’s curls, but also from so much carrying of children. I felt my whole torso, pelvis to chest, alive and receptive, alert to the idea of something coming inside me, a kind of aliveness. It was desire, though I didn’t know that then, nor did I know exactly that I wanted. I only knew I wanted, which itself felt precious and also dangerous, like a fragile but powerful thing I’d been charged with, a thing that could flourish or die based solely on me and my next steps.
I lacked words for what I felt back then—perhaps I even lacked a concept. But I felt it nonetheless, and it was good. It was very, very good.
Old-timers, this is the second-to-last time you’ll see this section, which is great in that you can stop skipping over it, but sad that we have only one more week of Visceral Self!
Meanwhile, for new folks, this How To Write in the Dark post will help you find your way around. And if you don’t already know, Billie Oh has created an ever-expanding catalogue of Visceral Self audio and video offerings including playlists, collated as a stand-alone post for founding members and provided as an easy button on every Visceral Self post, like this:
Resources in the Founding Member Immersive Meditation Guide include the whole set for the intensive so far (so for now, resources for Weeks 1-11). Usually Billie reads the week’s poem/excerpt out loud, along the abridged version of the writing exercise, so that you can listen to both while you are in the yoga pose and write immediately afterward. If you’re not using Billie’s audio, you can read the writing exercise/prompt a couple of times to yourself (out loud) before settling into the pose (if you are doing the pose), then write immediately when you come out of the pose.
Week Eleven Writing Exercise | Can I Turn It Into A Poem (Or Poem-ish Thing)?
Our reading this week is a strange, luminous, gritty thing from Kim Addonizio. It confronts, in an angular way, the conflicting realities of living in a body—the pleasure and pain, the fleetingness. Some things I love about this week’s reading are:
its firm grip on the “ugly-beautiful axis” (a term I just made up for you now)
its boldness in asking me to not know exactly what it is saying in all cases, and in that way asking me to first feel it then think harder
precise and even startling observations of the natural world
the use of unexpected, back-to-back exclamations
an ending that challenges me
As always, we’ll do a close reading of this short work by Addonizio, accompanied by a full-body meditation and an embodied writing exercise.