"Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning." ~ Maya Angelou
Visceral Self | Writing Through the Body: Week Seven Throat Chakra | A Sound Escapes Me
Visceral Self: Writing Through the Body & other events below (manage/upgrade here to join!). All Zoom links emailed day of.
📝 Fri May 17, SPECIAL FREE in-person and hybrid narrative health event at U of MN: Planting Seeds of Radical Hope Symposium (FREE, in person and virtual, Jeannine leads one of the collaborative writing sessions)
🗓️ Thurs, May 23, Noon-1 PM Silent Co-Write on Zoom (paid)
🕯️Wed June 12, 8 PM CT, Candlelight Yoga Nidra (founding)
🕯️Fri June 21, 1 PM CT, Celebratory Live Solstice Salon w/open mic (founding)
Friends, we’re more than halfway through our embodied writing intensive. It’s time for the throat chakra! And on that topic, I could write a whole book.
I am a survivor of long-term early childhood sexual abuse.
Learning to use my voice saved my life, literally.
Not surprisingly, I have written plenty and often about voiceleness in Writing in the Dark and elsewhere, including:
Thoughts on selective mutism and an exercise in voice in The World, It Speaks.
The power of voice in our writing here, in Voices Impel the Telling.
The cost of speaking out in my essay “The Cost” which Ilanot Review recently nominated for Best American Essays 2024.
This is why I say, with not a trace of exaggeration, that writing saved my life, so I teach writing as if it might save yours.
The throat chakra is foundational to our ability to thrive as writers (and humans). Therefore, this week’s work is deep, indeed.
We’ll have an optional restorative yoga pose to activate the throat chakra, a vocal exercise to do the same, a close reading of a powerful Ada Limon poem, and a strange and constrained writing exercise to amplify the power of your own voice and let you, just maybe, hear yourself anew, and more clearly than before.
We’ll see.
Meanwhile, before we begin, three really fast updates!
On June 27, I’m teaching my first live workshop (on Zoom) since last fall—”The Feeling of What Happens,” on advanced techniques for writing to make readers feel something. All levels, all genres. Founding/paid WITDers receive discounted tuition! Codes will be emailed when registration opens on Friday (upgrade here now if you want to). This generative workshop will be hard work and great fun. Also, perfect chance to see if you like studying with me live and synchronous … because the live, synchronous version of WITD is finally be returning this September, in six-session segments!!
In case you missed it, the extraordinary Sarah Fay of
interviewed me for her exciting new Substack Visionary series. The full interview is here. I could not be more honored. Substack has never featured WITD, so this is extra special.For anyone who is new, thank you! You can absolutely can jump into this embodied writing intensive right now, it is never too late, you can read the posts in any order and do the writing exercises in any order or not at all. You are warmly welcomed.
I’m still hanging out and catching up in the comments from Week Six, just so you know! Your work is so beautiful!
Now, for the throat chakra. Anais Nin famously said:
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
For me, this is what the throat chakra is all about: opening.
There is power in words, and when we stand in our own power through our voice, we are able to use sounds wisely and bravely and precisely, but also with a wildness and a lack of control, but also compassionately and with restraint, but also with great tenderness and care, but also in ways we cannot even imagine until we discover them in the midst of vocalizing.
Being in that balanced middle place allows us to speak what needs to be spoken, which is crucial, while also allowing us to know what is better left unsaid, which may be just as crucial or more so. And I say that with great earnestness and care, given my history of being silenced. Learning to claim silence and use silence for the good has been part of reclaiming my strong, resonant, truthful voice.
So, yes, being aware of and able to access, at least some of the time, that on-purpose balanced middle place also allows us to safely visit the other ends of the continuum—the wild abandon of a necessary scream, the delicious peace of extended silence. Too, the awareness of the open/close valve on our throat chakra provides us the power to throw our heads back and sing, yet another quality that makes us uniquely human.
How often I think of Dorianne Laux’s brilliant and gorgeous poem, “Death Comes to Me Again, A Girl” in which a young ghost muses aloud:
I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.
When they fight, and when they sing.
It says so much about the spectrum of a human life.
What does all this have to do with writing, though? Everything, friends. Everything. As Maya Angelou said:
"Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning."
Separating our human, physical voice from our writing is the opposite of embodiment. This is just one of the reasons it is so crucial to read your work out loud, to hear its sounds, rhythms, and irregularities. It’s beautiful strangeness.
If our work is to have that coveted quality of “voice,” then so must we.
Week Seven Writing Exercise | A Sound Escapes Me
To note, Ada Limon herself said this about the poem we’ll be reading this week:
“This poem was an attempt at a minor rebellion. There is so much grief and agony and tumult that surrounds us and yet we must live too. I found myself watching the groundhog steal my tomatoes and I was almost envious. She looked so safe and satisfied. I want to be that groundhog; I want to be allowed pleasure again.”
When she visited VCFA while I was there for grad school, Limon shared a bit more backstory about the poem, about how the editors had, I think, if I remember correctly, asked her to consider writing a poem that touched on her experience as a brown-skinned poet in a white world. In other words, they requested her pain. Through this poem (again, if I recall correctly, and I think I do, or pretty close), Ada Limon declined to give her pain on command.
I love this idea of a poem as a minor rebellion.
And I love the idea that we must live (which of course reminds me of Jane Kenyon’s Evening Sun from Week Four) and that this might be preceded by a sound escaped as a “small spasm of joy.”
So let’s dig in. I am excited to hear your thoughts and read your work!