Writer's Society: Joy Harjo
What can Joy Harjo teach us about our inner territories, our sacred breath, our delightful poet souls?
We’re going to find out. In this Writer’s Society class, we’re exploring Harjo’s voice and work - the rise and fall of her storytelling, the intricate weaving of stunning visuals and heart pounding truths, the intimacy of both grief and aliveness.
Reclaiming What Was Never Lost: Part Three with Nat
When and how was Germania born?
Her origins are foggy, her emergence fungal—spread out, adaptive. But from the start, she carried wounds. We have traced her traumas backward through time—through war, plague, and conquest, through multiple layers of the Vaterland, all the way to the Roman Empire, and the Church’s grip on the psyche. We have named the harm. We have found the trauma.
Cord Cutting: Invasive Roots
A cord cutting that centers what is native to our souls. Traveling inward we thoughtfully recognize what has been brought into our hearts, minds, and lives and yet does not belong there. We begin to take note of what - like plants in our outer worlds - has started to take over, disrupt, inflame, and damage. What has spread beyond control? What has infiltrated the soil of our lives, choking out our once healthy inner ecosystems?
Mary Austin's Wild Voice
We’re channeling Mary Austin’s deep love of nature, of wild and barren places. We’re standing in the soil of a life that should have had more options. We’re looking gently, yet honestly, at her many mistakes and at the harm she left in her wake. We’re unfolding the story below her story - the one of women who are married off young and only discover the trap of it all too late. We’re reviving the hunger for aliveness that drove her into the desert again and again. We’re grieving the sad life of her daughter, and we’re standing at that young grave with the flowers her mother should have filled her life with. We’re writing as ones who have also been stuffed down into small lives and nearly burned down the world to claim bigger ones. We’re writing ourselves out into the desert, out into mountains with personalities and sunset colors that make us rethink everything we’ve believed about art.
The Way-Changer: Inside Your Green Heart
Over the next year or so we’ll be making our way through the 7 centers of our inner territories: the catacombs, the sea, the warm womb, the forested heart, the waterfalls, the oracular pool, and the divine well. These are familiar places for us. We’ve called them chakras, and we’ve worked really hard to become attuned to them.
You Are The Völva: The Spellcraft of Writing
The Völva (absolutely pronounced the way you think it is) was an Old Norse seeress whose work we see most prominently in the Völuspá, the best-known poem of the Poetic Edda. The Völva was a poet and oracle who wrote the world into creation, endings, and rebirths. As our world leans further and further into disruption, decolonization, and yet another end, this is an archetype we were born to embody. So we’re gathering for a class centered around the agitating, mystical, earth-based spellcraft of writing.