What we’re about
RAW is made up of meetings with writers who write! I am charging a minuscule membership fee so that we are made up of committed people who want to build community. Please let me know if you cannot afford this fee, or if you have any other feelings about it. Nobody will be turned away for lack of funds.
Please read below to learn more about this unique and evolving experience and please offer any feedback you may have to help make it a stronger and more lively group!
In this group we will cultivate a practice in becoming an embodied "audience" or reader for one another and in doing so, we can learn to offer our whole selves in service to each other becoming more skillful writers. If you are into a purely intellectual discussion about modifiers, commas, sentence structure, and plot- please know that while there will be room for those concepts, this group differs. Loosely informed by practices from The Writing Warrior, by Laraine Herring, as well as insights from Writing from the Body by John Lee, we will journey to support the pleasure we find in writing. For many of us, this is why we show up at the keyboard or the page- because it is pleasure, or play.
Our work will be guided by the principles of Radical Aliveness, which are 1) Say Yes to Everything 2) Welcome Multiple Perspectives 3) Be willing to be Changed, 4) Cultivate a non shaming heart and 5) Know that we don't know. A 6th principle, Do No Harm, will also be woven into this space.
In each group meetings in a series, we will begin with movement, and then enter a timed shared writing space. Then, writers will have a chance to share their work- either what is produced in the group meeting, or a piece they are working on. We will close with a timed writing about what we are knowing after being in a shared space with other writerly bodies.
Ideally, after a time learning to be in this fertile format, we will rotate leadership as the hope is to build a collaborative and horizontally led space.
Come willing to move, willing to share openly, and willing to be changed. Come prepared to co-create principles around safety in the space, and willing to uphold a safe container for expression for all bodies. This group welcomes all bodies- of differing abilities and sizes and colors, sexualities and genders. This will not be an ordinary writing group, though we are all (mostly) ordinary people who love to write. Come prepared to give and receive and leave feeling more alive.
Feel free to read the books mentioned above or offer your own suggestions to the group!
