Join the CARE Center for a writing workshop during Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The CARE Center aims to raise awareness and provide a safe space for victims-survivors to learn about healing tools. This year, we'd like participants to explore and practice storytelling as a tool for healing. That is why our theme this year is: Thrive in Y(our) Story. While there are various ways to tell y(our) story, you'll have a chance to explore telling it through art, writing, and movement.
Space is limited! Register by Friday, April 9, at 5 p.m.
Wound Dwelling: Befriending Our Body(ies) through Story with Jennifer Patterson
Tuesday, April 13, 3 - 5 p.m. via Zoom (link will be emailed after RSVP)
What does it mean to have deep wounds that are almost beyond language? Beyond words? What does it mean to always try to find words anyway? How can we move into this writing the
unwritable, this way of knowing that is in the deep well of the body?
In this workshop, we will give language to the stories living in our bodies through somatic exercises, reading other writer’s work, prompted writing exercises, and time to share for anyone who wants to share. (No pressure though!) In writing, there is freedom as writing never has to look one way but first we need to let go of what writing “should” look like; move back into what the body knows writing can be.
Please bring your snacks, your tea or water, a notebook and pen (or laptop works too!), your pillows or blankets for comfort. Whatever will help you feel supported in this deep work is welcome. Please join us if you struggle to write, if you struggle to make sense of the trauma you’ve experienced, if you feel disconnected from your body. Please join if you want to dive more deeply into the stories you are holding, if you want to start a writing practice or even just want to try it once. There is room for you here with us.
About the Facilitator
Jennifer Patterson is a grief worker who uses plants, breath, and words to explore survivorhood, body(ies) and healing. A queer- and trans-affirming and centering, trauma-experienced herbalist and breathwork facilitator, Jennifer offers sliding-scale care as a practitioner through her private practice, Corpus Ritual, and is a member of The Breathe Network. She has facilitated workshops at healing centers, LGBTQ centers, a needle exchange and harm reduction clinic, online with the Transformative Language Arts Network, sexual violence resource centers, at colleges and universities, veterans hospitals, the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do? and a Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish healing center. She is the author of The Power of Breathwork: Simple Practices to Promote Wellbeing (Quarto). Editor of the anthology Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti- Violence Movement (2016), Jennifer speaks across the country, and has had writing published in places like VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, 580 Split, OCHO: A Journal of Queer Arts, Nat. Brut, The Establishment, HandJob, and The Feminist Wire. She was also the creative nonfiction editor of Hematopoiesis Press. A graduate of Goddard College’s MA program, Jennifer is finishing a book project focused on translating embodied traumatic experience through somatic practices and critical and creative nonfiction.
