Janice Lee's Blog

The Dandelions Are Prophesizing: A Writing Workshop Through Plant & Mycelial Encounters

More details & to register.

July 23 – August 19, 2023

(Synchronous Zoom sessions Mondays 7/24, 7/31, 8/7, 8/14)

Note: This workshop has sold out every time I’ve offered it. This is the last time that I will be offering this as I move on to different collaborations & offerings.

“The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.” – Thich Nhat Hanh 

“If we are interested in livability, impermanence, and emergence, we should be watching the action of landscape assemblages. Assemblages coalesce, change, and dissolve: this is the story.”  – Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

“Medicine and sickness heal each other. 
The whole world is medicine. 
Where do you find yourself?” – Yunmen Wenyan

“How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things.”  – Eduardo Kohn

“Identity is the factoring out and performative denial of our own perceptual immersion or entanglement with forces that generate and undo the boundaries with which we mark ourselves as different from others.” – Bayo Akomolafe

The dandelions are prophesizing.

What are you afraid to see, in the tenuous space you are being given? For you, what is on the other side of the portal and what pain do you have yet to experience? What more can you learn from the geese, the moss, the dandelions, the mushrooms, the concrete beneath your feet?

How can you orient yourself differently from within, to not see the world as broken—as something to be fixed or saved—but as an entanglement of becomings and worldings of which you are a small but integral part?

What is it that you are trying to protect? In your silence and complacency, what is it that has really been at stake for you? What have you been guarding, protecting, keeping close to you, keeping distant, what struggles have you avoided your entire life, what struggles are you avoiding still? In protecting what you have felt like you have earned, in caring about those in your immediate view, in using exclusivity when it comes to compassion and awareness, how have you contributed to everything that you can so easily criticize in language but have yet to understand your own intimate relationality with these so-called broken systems? How have you contributed to the environmental degradation of this planet, to systemic racism, to the real harm against black and brown bodies, to civil wars and genocides, to the violence in the streets and all over the world, to this pandemic, to all of the suffering in this world, to all of the imbalance? How have you forgotten that you are not an individual, not a self-enclosed ecology but part of a global body, connected to every other being, every other atom on this planet, all of the energy of the cosmos and the earth, of the past and present and future, how have you forgotten what you really are and what change you are truly capable of instigating?

This four-week online workshop will encourage you to expand your awareness and language through new encounters with plant and mycelial networks, to see the world as non-linear and entangled, and to imagine new futures that don’t depend on replicating the energies of the systems we seek to dismantle or the patterns we seek to heal from. We will investigate the speculative potentialities of futures beyond capital and justice-oriented systems, imagine identity and being through the lens of assemblage and permeability, and explore new and porous ways of working towards individual and collective change.

In this generative and healing-focused workshop, we will be supported by writing prompts, guided meditations, intuition exercises, personal medicine work, shamanic practices, divination, communing with plant and animal beings, Buddhist teachings, ceremony, and readings from multiple genres to explore the articulation of an entangled worldview. (Some of the diverse readings will include work by authors such as Bayo Akomolafe, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Vincianne Despret, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Wendy Burk, Brenda Iijima, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Marisol de la Cadena.)

Workshop Structure:

In order to accommodate both synchronous and asynchronous modes, the majority of the work will be asynchronous and can be self-paced for each week (ie. readings, writing prompts, exercises, discussions). There will be 4 synchronous meetings (via Zoom). The 4 sessions will be Mondays from 11AM-1:30PM PST: 7/24, 7/31, 8/7, 8/14). Though attendance at these meetings is highly encouraged, it is not mandatory. All meetings will be recorded and posted the next day, for those who are unable to make part or all of the meeting times, with guided instructions on any activities/exercises covered during the meetings to be posted online. As well, there is an optional opportunity to have a one 1-on-1 conference with Janice during the 4-week period, plus optional group office hours sessions for further connection and support.

***

Pricing:

The following payment model is inspired by and borrowed from the payment model of Bayo Akomolafe’s class, We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks. 

This course offers two sliding scales based on your relative financial standing. The huge range listed below is meant to reflect the incredible disparity in economic conditions of people living in different parts of the world, and also the historical reality of stolen wealth in many different forms, generally from the so-called Global South to the North. In an effort to reflect disparity in economic condition and access to wealth, the following payment system is designed for those with more wealth to help cover the costs of those with less access to wealth and resources. We trust your discernment of how your current financial situation and how you fit into the global economic context.

As you decide what amount to pay, please consider your present-day financial situation governed by income, but also the following factors: historical discrimination faced by your peoples; your financial wealth (retirement/savings/investments); your access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated (how easily could you earn more income compared to other people in your community, country, and the world); people counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members; the socio-economic conditions of your locale (relative to other places in your country and in the world); your relationship to food & resource scarcity.

For people with medium to high access to wealth in the global context, are generally considered middle or upper class in the Global North, own land or property, have investments or retirement savings, are expecting an inheritance, can travel internationally for pleasure, and/or enjoy a comfortable lifestyle.

$600 Partner I

$480 Supporter I

$410 Companion I (Note: This amount reflects the “real” value of this course.)

$300 Friend I

For people with lower access to wealth in the global context, are systematically disadvantaged and living in the Global South, are poor/working class in the Global North, belong to a historically disenfranchised group, don’t have access to savings, are living paycheck to paycheck or relying on government or other aid, and/or have anxiety regularly about having access to food, resources, or shelter.

$250 Partner II

$150 Supporter II

$60 Friend II

Scholarships are also still available for BIPOC and anyone needing further financial assistance. Please email Daniel at [email protected] for more info, or if you are feeling challenged in any way by the financial requirements of participation.

Testimonials:

If you care about Earth, then I highly recommend The Dandelions are Prophesizing. Janice Lee is gracious and adept at holding expansive space…a space where one is invited to step away from long held perspectives and explore what other beings that co-exist on this planet may be experiencing alongside us humans as we journey together. 
– AR

Janice is calm and open, sets a tone and pace during the workshop that feels accessible and comfortable. She is so generous and considerate in the course structure she creates, all those spectacular reading materials, and her communication of expectations (which encourages each person to measure and decide about engagement). She has an amazing mind I find fascinating and an expansive spirit I trust. 
– EP

Janice Lee is not only a brilliant author, but a wonderfully creative and generous teacher as well. We moved through so much fascinating material in four weeks. I loved the writing prompts, which encouraged us to communicate with the realms of plant, animal and spirit in a way that truly enhanced our assignments and group discussions. I highly recommend her classes!
– AH

Janice holds space for whatever you can offer, and as any good social anthropologist with sentient capacity, shows you how your energy and thoughts are tied to fertile life lines. A terrific teacher, broadly read, she will change your outlook on what matters in your writing, for your writing. 
– AF

Janice is a dream teacher. I can’t imagine anyone not feeling safe and comfortable with her. Her essence embodies an innate  grace and softness. These qualities, combined with her depth of the spiritual and literary world create magic
– MG

Janice’s courses have allowed me to access a fluidity of voice/writing that I didn’t know was possible after a lifetime of being silenced by my trauma. I’d done all kinds of therapeutic approaches to try to unblock my voice (coaching, somatics, rituals, inner child work, hypnotherapy, talk therapy, trauma therapy) and nothing dislodged this blockage before. Janice’s meditations opened my writing up to the point where there’s no more internal torment of gatekeeping. I’ve been writing fluidly and easily, which is a profound transformation. 
– TL

Co-Dependencies: On Healing, Remembering, Breathing & Writing Trauma

More details & to register.

April 30 – May 27, 2023

(Synchronous Zoom sessions Mondays 5/1, 5/8, 5/15, 5/22)

Note: This workshop has sold out every time I’ve offered it. This is the last time that I will be offering this as I move on to different collaborations & offerings.

“What really exists is not things made but things in the making.” –William James

“How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things.” –Eduardo Kohn

On han: “A feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined.” –Suh Nam-dong

“Death needs a new cosmology. Death is not a black hole where things cease to be. If you want to live well, keep death close. Hope includes hopelessness and grieving is showing gratitude for that which has been lost. What would it be like to treat grief as power? Even our hopelessness as a form of decomposing and falling away that is sacred.” –Bayo Akomolafe

“The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.” –Thich Nhat Hanh

How are the frames of reference and relationships between and of living beings activated? That is, how do different bodies and worlds articulate each other, or, how do we learn to be affected? How do we reconcile personal experience with historical fact? How do we reconcile history with memory? How do we reconcile truths with other truths? How does writing open up space while processing trauma or grief?

This four-week online workshop will begin with the unique emotional identity and Korean concept of han and its relationship to concepts of inherited trauma, looking closely at the relationship of cultural history & identity and aesthetics & narrative and exploring how the presence of unresolved corporeal history and the impossibility of articulation or expression leads to new encounters in language and narrative.

Through this generative and healing-focused workshop, we will use writing prompts, guided meditations, intuition exercises, personal medicine work, shamanic practices, divination, mapping, unbinding wounds & trauma, communing with plant and animal beings, and ceremony to explore the articulation of experience and trauma (lived and inherited). We will explore texts from all genres and work directly on developing a personal healing and writing practice while exploring lived/embodied experience, the body as both a compromised site and as a site for resistance, and connections to thinking about healing from other lineages, including plant & animal medicine, Buddhism, Korean folk ritual, and different lineages of shamanism. There will be optional opportunities for peer feedback.

Workshop Structure:

In order to accommodate both synchronous and asynchronous modes, the majority of the work will be asynchronous and can be self-paced for each week (ie. readings, writing prompts, exercises, discussions). There will be 4 synchronous meetings (via Zoom). The 4 sessions will be Mondays from 11AM-1:30PM PST: 5/1, 5/8, 5/15, 5/22). Though attendance at these meetings is highly encouraged, it is not mandatory. All meetings will be recorded and posted the next day, for those who are unable to make part or all of the meeting times, with guided instructions on any activities/exercises covered during the meetings to be posted online. As well, there is an optional opportunity to have a one 1-on-1 conference with Janice during the 4-week period, plus optional group office hours sessions for further connection and support.

***

Pricing:

The following payment model is inspired by and borrowed from the payment model of Bayo Akomolafe’s class, We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks. 

This course offers two sliding scales based on your relative financial standing. The huge range listed below is meant to reflect the incredible disparity in economic conditions of people living in different parts of the world, and also the historical reality of stolen wealth in many different forms, generally from the so-called Global South to the North. In an effort to reflect disparity in economic condition and access to wealth, the following payment system is designed for those with more wealth to help cover the costs of those with less access to wealth and resources. We trust your discernment of how your current financial situation and how you fit into the global economic context.

As you decide what amount to pay, please consider your present-day financial situation governed by income, but also the following factors: historical discrimination faced by your peoples; your financial wealth (retirement/savings/investments); your access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated (how easily could you earn more income compared to other people in your community, country, and the world); people counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members; the socio-economic conditions of your locale (relative to other places in your country and in the world); your relationship to food & resource scarcity.

For people with medium to high access to wealth in the global context, are generally considered middle or upper class in the Global North, own land or property, have investments or retirement savings, are expecting an inheritance, can travel internationally for pleasure, and/or enjoy a comfortable lifestyle.

$600 Partner I

$480 Supporter I

$410 Companion I (Note: This amount reflects the “real” value of this course.)

$300 Friend I

For people with lower access to wealth in the global context, are systematically disadvantaged and living in the Global South, are poor/working class in the Global North, belong to a historically disenfranchised group, don’t have access to savings, are living paycheck to paycheck or relying on government or other aid, and/or have anxiety regularly about having access to food, resources, or shelter.

$250 Partner II

$150 Supporter II

$60 Friend II

Scholarships are also still available for BIPOC and anyone needing further financial assistance. Please email Daniel at [email protected] for more info, or if you are feeling challenged in any way by the financial requirements of participation.

Testimonials:

Janice’s class was transformative for me on all the levels: creative, psychic, literary, healing. The readings and viewings were robust and inspiring. Because of Janice, I am now actively seeking to communicate with more of the plants around me, even the smallest ones in the cracks in the sidewalk, because this transforms the world into a place of magic and possibility, even in the midst of political turmoil and global pandemic.
– CH

I loved this course with Janice and highly recommend it. The combination of instruction, writing prompts, readings and shamanic healing practices were both inspiring and beneficial. I was often surprised by the doors it opened in my writing process and am grateful for the expansion of my worldview. Kudos Janice on an amazing holding of space to allow vulnerability to transform into healing. It was a very rich and transformative experience.
– EE

It was so wonderful to work with Janice. I would do so again in a heartbeat. She held the online space with care and attentiveness, she was warm, and she was focused. I loved how clear she was that the purpose of the workshop space was the process itself and not any particular kind of product or experience… Janice Lee’s Co-Dependencies was the sacred writing space that I needed to close out 2020. The ritual elements of the workshop opened up pathways to releasing accumulated griefs, and the meditations brought me to new understandings of myself. The space she created for vulnerable dialogues and connections was something that I haven’t experienced in any other writing class.
– JW

If you’re ready for deep self-reflection, deep imagination, deep connection, and deep care, work with Janice. The resources she shares on all levels — literary, organizational, creative, interpersonal, and spiritual — are designed to allow those who work with her to define our own path(s) in her company. Janice’s courses are radical autonomous pedagogy in action. Janice Lee’s Co-Dependencies class took my heart further into empathy. Thank you so much for this experience into my own underworld, lineage and present power. I feel unlocked by it.
– KK

Janice is a generous and compassionate instructor. I would never call this class a writing workshop (even though I got some GREAT writing out of it)–it is much more like a journey. Janice deftly leads you into places where you are tender, hurt, or grieving so that you can witness, map, and maybe! Even begin to heal. She makes ample and supportive room for all kinds of writers and her prompts and materials are thoughtful, thought-provoking, and offer new ways of contextualizing one’s own sorrow. If I could, I’d take this class every spring, to be led out of the winter darkness and into the light of possibilities!
– C

Co-Dependencies taught by Janice Lee is groundbreaking. She challenges the notion of what it means to take a writing course and to be a writer by introducing gentle healing practices that bring you closer to your heart and soul. Everyone benefits from her approach, no matter where you situate yourself on the woo-woo scale. I have been waiting for this my whole life (and I’m old!). Thank you Janice Lee and all the folks at Corporeal Writing for helping writers of all stripes learn what it means to be embodied and integrated (as much as possible) when putting words together.
– BW

JESSICA E. JOHNSON & JANICE LEE: A READING & CONVERSATION

Sat, March 18 from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm PDT

Event Page

Literary Arts
925 SW Washington Street 
Portland, OR 97205

Jessica E. Johnson, Janice Lee

Join us in celebrating the launch of Metabolics (University of Chicago Press). Author Jessica E. Johnson will be joined in conversation by Janice Lee, author of Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press) and Separation Anxiety (Clash Books). The conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A.This event is free and open to the public, in-person at Literary Arts. If you have any questions, contact Jessica Meza-Torres at [email protected].

Details TBA

WOHESC (Washington Oregon Higher Education Sustainability Conference) March 6-8, 2023

Conference Program

Opening Plenary:Making Kin: Writing the More-Than-Human World in the Age of Global Warming

9:50AM Tuesday, March 7th, 2023

In Staying with the Trouble Donna Haraway calls for humans to “make kin” with the rest of the world and within human relationships. As she writes, “Kin is an assembling sort of word.” This concept begs the questions: What do we owe to the other animals and plants? What do we have to learn from them? How would a more relational approach shift human engagement with the rest of the planet? And even as we make kin, how do we then fight for, grieve, and mourn ongoing losses? In this plenary discussion, four writers from diverse fields—including fiction, poetry, and non-fiction encompassing essays, nature writing, and journalism—explore the ways we have, could, and should relate to the more-than-human-world amidst the impacts of global warming.

Adaptation: Something to Something ElseA webinar with Lidia Yuknavitch and Janice Lee
Thursday, March 2nd 1pm-4pm Pacific

More Details at Corporeal Writing Website

(A recording will be made available to all registrants for a limited period afterwards.)

To go from tail to legs. To sprout wings. To regenerate a limb, an idea. To transform anger into desire into story or image or sound. To go from particle and wave and back again. To listen, to swim, to hold water, to migrate, to flower, to dig. A whisper, an image, a film flicker, a long exhale.

What can writers and artists learn from plant, animal, elemental, and cosmic adaptations? Might new kinds of storytelling shapes and guts arise if we let the constructs we’ve inherited dissolve and come to different forms? How are we always already becoming something else?

In this workshop, we’ll explore and generate new, hybrid, perhaps messy forms of writing. We’ll find new shapes to construct or inhabit. We’ll dig new burrows and morph our bodies (our own and those of our texts).

Pricing:

The following payment model is inspired by and borrowed from the payment model of Bayo Akomolafe’s class, We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks.

This workshop offers a sliding scale based on your relative financial standing. In an effort to reflect disparity in economic condition and access to wealth, the following payment system is designed for those with more wealth to help cover the costs of those with less access to wealth and resources. We trust your discernment of your current financial situation and how you fit into the global economic context.

As you decide what amount to pay, please consider your present-day financial situation governed by income, but also the following factors: historical discrimination faced by your peoples; your financial wealth (retirement/savings/investments); your access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated (how easily could you earn more income compared to other people in your community, country, and the world; are you expecting an inheritance); people counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members; the socio-economic conditions of your locale (relative to other places in your country and in the world); your relationship to food & resource scarcity.

$275 Partner

$225 Supporter (Note: This amount reflects the “real” value of this course.)

$175 Companion

$150 Friend

A limited number of scholarships are also available for anyone needing further financial assistance. Please email Daniel at [email protected] for more info, or if you are feeling challenged in any way by the financial requirements of participation.

Eileen Myles in Conversation With Jess Arndt, Janice Lee & Camille Roy

Powell’s Event Page

Wednesday, December 7 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

“Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their bold and bracing introduction to Pathetic Literature (Grove Press), an exuberant collection of pieces ranging from poetry to theater to prose to something in between, all of which explore those so-called “pathetic” or sensitive feelings around which lives are built and revolutions are incited. Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their reinvention of “pathetic” formed the bedrock for this anthology, which includes a breathtaking 105 contributors, encompassing titans of global literature like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, queer icons and revolutionaries like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as the invigorating newness and excitement of writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris. The result is a matchless anthology that is as much an ongoing dialogue as an essential compendium of queer, revolutionary, joyful, and always moving literature. From confrontations with suffering, embarrassment, and disquiet, to the comforts and consolations of finding one’s familiar double in a poem, Pathetic Literature is a swarming taxonomy of ways to think differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful planet. Myles will be joined in conversation by Pathetic Literature contributors Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals; Janice Lee, author Separation Anxiety; and Camille Roy, author of Honey Mine.

Shadow Work: Letting Go & Rituals for Release

$35 – $65

For more details and to register, see the Eventbrite Page

12-2PM PDT
Saturday, November 5, 2022

Online event

Sink into the season of shadow work with Janice Lee, who’ll guide us through a ritual for release, so we can better embody the magic of now.

Letting go isn’t about eliminating desire, ambition, or hope, but about unattaching ourselves from those hopes, about no longer clinging to a sense of control, about no longer seeing the world in a linear way. When we cling to the hope of a “better future,” we long for a sense of control that has never and will never exist. We only see what’s wrong now and wait for a future that is yet to come. We use all of our present energy waiting or trying to fix things because we are clinging to certain notions of justice or loss, but when we let go, we can live in the present moment, live with presence and awareness, have gratitude for everything that exists now, and imagine new futures that don’t depend on replicating the energies of the systems we seek to dismantle or the patterns we seek to heal from.

Letting go means breathing, living with open arms, allowing for openness and vulnerability and possibility, and accepting what is while still creating the impossible. This workshop, led by Janice Lee (published writer, teacher, shamanic healer) will consist of a guided meditation, a freewriting session, and a communal ceremony (that will be finished on your own).

More details & Registration Link

Saturday October 15th, 2022 1PM—3:30PM Pacific over Zoom

“Form is about listening.”
– Teresa Carmody

“The ear is the first organ to develop in the fetus and the last one to stop functioning during the process of death. This prominence at the beginning and end of our life cycle indicates that the ear may hold valuable keys to the mysteries of life…While our eyes help light our path through this world, we also know that we came from darkness and will return to darkness…
Where we cannot see, sound can guide us.”
– Russill Paul, The Yoga of Sound

“The only way to know the world or think about the world is to think with it, is to participate with/in it, is to intervene, and make marks upon it – even as those marks are made on our own bodies in the selfsame moment. The idea that there is a place to occupy, a privileged site upon which to perch ourselves and with unbothered feathers look out on the world, a place outside the world that is pure and uncluttered (or perhaps deep within ourselves in its promising interiority) from which we can view everything… a view from nowhere and everywhere at once… is the epistemic affordance of geophysical and colonial stability. To know is to navigate speciated territories of corporeal exchanges. To know is to come unhinged, to be bruised, to be beaten, to be broken. To know is to be filleted and de-fleshed. It is to have stretch marks penned on the body, the fonts of an encounter, echoes of an obstruction. One does not think without becoming something else.”
– Bayo Akomolafe

“I think particularly of the English sentence, which forces one to begin with a subject, a kind of encapsulated self or other that speaks, sees, knows, or, in the case of objects, a subjectivity that presumes grasp-ability.”
– Renee Gladman

“How could we be one, or two, or three? We are more gerund than cold, hard noun. More animacy than strictly animal. We ensoul the world and are ensouled in return. Our myths about individuation and linearity no longer hold all the trouble. And all the love. We need to stop sticking out our two hands like it proves everything comes in oppositional dualisms. How many hands does the tree have? The peony? The pileated woodpecker? How many hands is the mycelium using to crochet intimacy from plant to tree to plant through the soil?”
– Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand

What is the language with which you move through the world, through which you think, experience, and “are”? Where does that language come from and what does it say about who you are, how you have come to be, how you continue to become, your environment, your privileges, your contextual entanglement with the world around you? When you look closely at just one sentence you have written, how does the sentence enact the performance of your existence and relationship to the world? What method of reading does your writing invite?

Both the sentence and the structure of the story represent and enact particular ways of seeing the world, being in the world, relating to the world. Seemingly simple sentences can enact particular value systems and ideologies: privileging the individual or the subject; an emphasis on action and doing, rather than existing; the emphasis on things or nouns and on static boundaries of beingness; the belief in cause and effect or causality in general; the buying into linear (and capitalist notions of) time; the glorification of triumph or the hero’s journey; the assumption that conflict is the main mechanism for story or happening; the erasure of alternate ways of inter-being…

We often glean meaning from the overall structure of a story, the narrative shape revealing something about subjects like reality, transformation, life and death. And before the story, there is the sentence, which can reveal an entire worldview through the shape it assumes, through the relationships it maps, which ideological systems it upholds, what power structures it validates simply through its grammar.

This is an invitation to listen to form, to ourselves, to the stories that are already here inside and around us. We will delve into spiritual being, ecological storytelling, and grammatical sense-making via craft discussions, guided meditation, intuition/shamanic practices, generative writing prompts, and inquiry/investigation of our own writing.

Bring: A single sentence from your own writing.

Suggested Reading: “On the Limits and Possibilities of the Sentence” by Janice Lee (Catapult)

The Dandelions are Prophesizing: A Workshop in Listening & Letting Go

Eventbrite: More details & to register

Saturday, September 10, 2022
11:00 AM – 2:00 PM PDT

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
681 Venice Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90291

An in-person generative workshop with writing prompts, meditations, personal healing work, facilitated by Janice Lee.

About this event

The dandelions are prophesizing.

This non-traditional workshop will encourage you to expand your awareness and language, focus on letting go of control and linear time, and move towards living in the present moment with presence, awareness, and gratitude, and to imagine new futures that don’t depend on replicating the energies of the systems we seek to dismantle or the patterns we seek to heal from. We will investigate the speculative potentialities of futures beyond capital and justice-oriented systems, imagine identity and being through the lens of assemblage and permeability, and explore new and porous ways of working towards individual and collective change.

In this generative and healing-focused workshop, we will be supported by writing prompts, guided meditations, intuition exercises, personal medicine work, divination, communing with plant and animal beings, Buddhist teachings, and a communal ceremony (that will be finished on your own at home).

Please bring writing tools and a small object that represents what you need to let go of, or a small stone, that will be buried in the ground after the workshop.

*One scholarship will be awarded to a QTPOC/BIPOC L.A.-residing individual who would like to join but does not have the means to do so. Please email us if interested at [email protected]

Workshop attendees are expected to participate in a respectful, constructive, and considerate manner. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our workshops, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, fellow participants, or facilitator.