Be held in imagining, creating, implementing, rejuvenating, and maintaining wholistic-exquisite-creative selfcare for our minds, bodies, and souls with abundant resourcing for ourselves, alone, within our immediate and extended families, and in our creative community(s). Bring you journal, sketch pad, colored pencils, brushes and paints as well as your computer and writing pad.
Welcoming 10:00 am-10:30 am
Meditation (5mim)
Writing 10:40 am-12:40 pm
Womanist Talk & Lunch 12:45 pm-2:45 pm
Meditation (5min.)
Writing 2:50 pm-3:50 pm
Womanist Talk 4:00 pm-5:00 pm
A Swim & or Hot Tub 5:15 pm-6:30 pm
Farewells 6:40 pm-7:00 pm
Maximum Participants: 5
Remuneration: AWL Member $60.00 Non-Member: $85
Reserve Your Day:
Sunday, July 24, 2022–Sunday, August 28, 2022 Sunday–September 19, 2022
Individual Writing Practices $70.00 per session $85.00 per session
Monday Just Write No Fee $20.00 per session
Tuesday Women of Color Group No Fee $40.00 per session
Wednesday Writing Group No Fee $40.00 per session
Weekly Prompts No Fee No Fee
Fall Women of Color Away Camp $1,200.00 $1,700.00
October 27th through 30th, 2022
(Pay $450.00 deposit by September 1, 2022. Contact me about committing to a payment plan if needed or desired. Let’s talk in our worth and delight.
Please make contribution to WOC Young Women of Color Writers. We pay full WOC Camp fees, child care, and transportation for young writing mothers of color and their young children . Please contribute as you can. A monthly contribution works as well. Please have others you know would delight in contributing to contact me.
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
Russian military forces bombed the Babyi Yar Memorial Park site in Kiev, Ukraine on March 1, 2022. I saw footage of a man climbing up on a tank and then kneeling before it. I imagined what that man might be thinking and feeling. I imagined that I was that man, that child killed in the bomb blast, that dead young soldier left behind on the side of the road by the Russian military that was being reported in coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On March 1, 2022, I remembered into feeling my own heart cracked open in the summer of 1962 when I was eleven-years old. That summer the goings on in my worlds had me trying to understand why Black people were hated and hunted and killed in my homes of Houma and New Orleans, Louisiana and Ocean Springs and Natchez, Mississippi. It was in Natchez, where my uncle was the editor of a local Black newspaper, that I greedily read the newspapers, journals and books that arrived for him. It was in Natchez during the summer of 1962 that I began to read in horror about the holocaust documented in The Wall by Jon Hersey and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer.
During the summer of 1962 I became completely terrified of all white people. Since all of the Jews I had ever known looked white to me, I assumed Jews had all of the same power and privileges of all white-looking people. Yet Hitler had sought to exterminate all Jews no matter how German they were or how white they looked or behaved. In my mind, heart, body and soul I came to appalling comprehensions. If white people interdicted look–like–white people, Jews and others, forced them to register their wealth, appropriated that wealth, evicted them, imprisoned them, enslaved them, and murdered them en masse based on the white superiority of only certain kinds of white- looking people, even in my eleven year old capacity, I understood the devastating truths of black peoples’ capture, enslavement, and our constant attempted subjugation, exploitation, terror, internment and murder.
While reading these books I understood the futility of Black people attempting to achieve full citizenship and agency in white people’s courts, governments, religions, science, education etc. I also understood our stubborn faith, purpose and determination to live free. I understood we had no choice since we could not change or hide our skin color, but we did have choices about how we lived, and lasted, and died, and left ourselves behind to carry on.
It was that summer, as I read those books, that I came across the documentation of the genocide at Babi Yar. It was also that summer that I read about the Red Summer of 1919 in the U.S., the mass killing of Black people, Black towns and communities, the theft of Black wealth, and the forced migrations of tens of thousands of Black people by white individuals, groups and communities that were supported by and sanctioned by white cultural, economic, religious and political institutions with white supremacist norms, along with city, state and federal laws and policies.
The invasion, bombing, forced migration, and attempted annihilation of Ukraine’s peoples, lands, and cultures has stirred in me in incandescent fear, rage, grief, and memories of other invasions, bombings, genocides, and attempted annihilations and erasures based on imperialism, hatred, fear, and profit in our current, recent, and not so distant histories. Since that summer of 1962 my rational fears are now accompanied by my steadfast persistence that all of us to be and be becoming self-determined, free, and in creative, purposeful, and joyous struggle for our precious lives, for our peoples’ precious lives.
I am angry, rageful really, that these histories are constantly repeating themselves. I am soul deep sad that I recognize them at home and abroad, and I am not surprised.
He was Disabled. He walked with crutches. He was older but not old. He was balding but not yet bald. He was not tall, but he was not short. He had the softening of middle age, just barely overweight. He was sad, soul deep sad, whole lifetimes of sad compressing to make room for more sad. He was angry, rageful really. His rage countered the bone cracking cold. The words of a poem tolled in his mind.
“…I see myself an ancient Israelite. I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured And even now, I bear the marks of nails…”
The ghosts of the deaths eighty-one years ago still crushed him, just as much as when he stood before the bloodied sidewalk where his neighbor’s daughter had been killed by the blast of a cruise missile while shopping with her mother; just as much as the dead remains of a young abandoned Russian soldier, not warm, still cooling, no more than a boy, lying dead on the side of the road, abandoned as columns of Russian trucks and tanks were turned around by Ukrainian resistance.
“…I see myself a boy in Belostok Blood spills, and runs upon the floors, The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded…”
When Ukrainian military forces stopped a Russian tank, he climbed aboard. As Russian soldiers’ faces and then bodies emerged from the top of the tank he clamored down. He knelt down in front of the tank. His neighbors tried to pull him away. He refused to move. As he knelt, he recited out loud the poem ringing within him, memorized from his boyhood:
“No monument stands over Babi Yar. A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone. I am afraid. Today, I am as old As the entire Jewish race itself….”
His neighbors finally moved him from in front of the tanks. They shepherded him away and sat him on a street curb safely away from the tanks. He continued reciting silently. They believed he had been and was still praying. He could not stop. He kept reciting the poem to himself over and over again until his neighbors took him home and laid him down on his bed.
“…And I myself, like one long soundless scream Above the thousands of thousands interred, I’m every old man executed here, As I am every child murdered here….”
Embedded poem stanzas from: Babi Yar by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Yevtushenko was a Russian poet born in 1933. He wrote this poem in 1961 in part to protest the Soviet Union’s refusal to identify Babi Yar, a ravine in the suburbs of Kiev, as a site of the mass murder of 33,000 Jews on September 29–30, 1941. Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Thirteenth Symphony” is based, in part, on this poem. From: The Collected Poems 1952–1990 by Yevgeny Yectushenko. Edited by Albert C. Todd with the author and James Ragan (Henry Holt and Company, 1991), pp. 102-104.
A view of the ravine at Babi Yar circa 1944. On September 29-30,
1941, more than 33,000 Jewish residents of Kiev were marched
to this site and systematically gunned down over the edge of the
ravine by members of the Sonderkommando 4a of Einstazgruppen C.
Tens of thousands of Gypsies and Soviet POWs were also executed at this site between 1941 and 1943.
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates At the first gate, ask yourself, “Is it true?” At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?” At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?”
Preserving women’s wellness and creative space for writers to share creative process, to build and sustain Women of Color
writing community, and to share and teach coping and liberating strategies to conquer sexism, racism, ableism, colorism,
anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other systems of structural oppression while living liberating and joyful lives.
Indigenous, North, Central and South American, South and East Asian, European, African, Immigrant, documented and
undocumented, Bi-Racial, all women who identify as women of color are welcome.
Preserving women’s wellness and creative space for writers to share creative process, to build and sustain Women of Color writing community, and to share
and teach coping and liberating strategies to conquer sexism, racism, ableism, colorism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other systems of structural oppression
while living liberating and joyful lives.
The point and spirit of belonging in a Radical Creative Womanist Workshopping in Community is to have women writers become experienced and proficient in all of the parts of bringing a
creative work to full life and use with the full support of a woman writing community. From first stroke on the page, to rewriting and re-writing, to reading and re-reading, to editing and
re-editing to publishing, we are not alone in our individual creative endeavors.
Radical Creative Womanist Workshopping in Communityincludes Co-Creators: The Writer-Reader, the Writer-Facilitator, the Writer-colleague, the Writer Co-Leader and Write-Teachers.
This radical writing community sees, holds, supports, imagines, and critiques the individual writer’s work into full useful art. The literary and craft feedback is powerful, productive, honoring to
the writer and the writing, and is critical to advancing the writing to its next creative level of excellence.
Radical Creative Womanist Workshopping in Community is in constant understanding that we are not alone, and we are all in co-creation with and for each other in radical generosity and reciprocity.
Location: Kokoro Clinic
339 15th Street, Suite 333
Oakland, Ca. 94612
Time: 10:00 am-2:00 pm EST
Dates:
Sunday, February 20, 2022
Sunday, March 20, 2022
Sunday, April 3, 2022
Sunday, May 15, 2022
Sunday, June 12, 2022
Cost: $40.00 Per Workshopping Members
$120.00 Per Workshopping Non–Members
Covid Self and Community Care that include vaccines, testing, and mask wearing will be observed.
Please share this offering and refer women of color writers you recommend to engage in and belong to our writing community.
A Writer's Life 