Writing to Transform Trauma
A Weekend Intensive for Black Writers & Artists
It is no secret that the historic and continuing violence on Black bodies has left many feeling hopelessness, fatigue, fear, and uncertainty.
On the first weekend of June 2023, 38 Black writers and artists who create in other disciplines spent the weekend together for a transformative experience. They explored expansive ways to express themselves through generative workshops that combined writing with music, visual art, photography, and movement. The participants ranged in age from teens to elders with a wide range of writing experience. Most live in the Twin Cities Metro Area and a few came in from areas in greater Minnesota.
We began on Friday evening with an opening circle to honor our ancestors followed by a hearty dinner and“Emerging Already, Sustaining Now,” an inspiring, interactive keynote that featured two of our faculty members; Douglas Kearney and Erin Sharkey in conversation with Resmaa Menakem, acclaimed healer, trauma specialist, and author of the New York Times best-sellers My Grandmother’s Hands, and The Quaking of America.
Saturday began with a healing workshop led by Mankwe Ndosi. After breakfast, we spent time in workshops with our faculty teams: poet/essayist/librettist, Douglas Kearney with sound artist, Dameun Strange; author/essayist, Shannon Gibney with visual artist, Leslie Barlow; author/playwright, Junauda Petrus with somatic therapist/movement artist, Andrea Potter; and memoirist/cultural worker, Erin Sharkey with photographer, Tia-Simone Gardner. Following a block of free time, we had an open mic led by our Commnications Apprentice, Makayla Overton.
We started our final day, Sunday, with a healing workshop led by Ayo Clemons followed by breakfast and more workshops led by our faculty writers: Douglas Kearney, Shannon Gibney, Junauda Petrus, and Erin Sharkey. After the morning workshops and lunch, acclaimed actor/singer, T. Mychael Rambo led us in a “Song of the Moment” exercise where the group created a song together that expressed what they would take away from the experience.
We ended with demonstrations by the artist teams, a closing circle and, finally a meditation led by Arleta Little which encouraged group members to consider how they might continue what they started during our weekend intensive.
I want to thank the More Than a Story Team: Nia Davis, Sandy Moore, Makayla Overton, John Thew; our event planning committee; Arleta Little, Rekhet Si-Asar, Erin Sharkey; event faculty: Douglas Kearney & Dameun Strange; Shannon Gibney & Leslie Barlow; Junauda Petrus & Andrea Potter; Erin Sharkey & Tia-Simone Gardner; healers: Ayo Clemons, Arleta Little, Mankwe Ndosi, T. Mychael Rambo; volunteers: Ebony Davis, Najah Davis, Imani Naomi, and JuQuane Williams. We couldn’t have done it without y’all!
Thanks also to the MN Humanities Center, members of the EAR collective, and Harry Waters, Jr. for generous funding and donations; to videographer, Tommy Franklin; and to all who chose to spend your first weekend of June with us.
“This work is funded in part by the Minnesota Humanities Center with money from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund that was created with the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.”
Workshop Descriptions
Visual Prisms
Young Adult Fiction writer, Shannon Gibney and Visual Artist, Leslie Barlow
How do you decide what genre to write in? What are the aesthetic and content concerns of that decision? And how does the work change or stay the same, depending on how it’s presented? In this workshop with writer Shannon Gibney and painter Leslie Barlow, you will explore how visual arts approaches such as scale, medium, and content can deepen your writing practice.
Writing in the liminal spaces
YOUNG ADULT Fiction writer, Shannon Gibney
In this workshop, writers will investigate the terrain of writing between and within multiple genres, including fiction, memoir, essays, journalism, and poetry. The use of collage techniques and strategies for adding pictures, documents, and letters to deepen and complicate story will also be explored.
Juicy Alchemy: Embodiment, Sensuality and Creative explorations
Fiction writer and playwright, Junauda Petrus and Afro-Caribbean dancer, Andrea Potter
What ways can our bodies, desires and imagination guide us in our writing? In this writing and movement workshop we will be uncovering layers of the self and our writing, through dance, movement and creative writing activities in the genres of speculative fiction and erotic writing. We will allow the wild desire and visceral imaginations that dwell in our tummies, toes and titties (of all genders) to surface and be held, listened to and cast upon the page. As we write, we will ground and move in our body to find new spaces and places in our writing. Writers and movers of all experiences, accessibility, genres and interests are welcome to play. Even if you are shy or limited in body movement, there is space for you here.
Re-Wilding the Teen Self
JUNAUDA PETRUS
What was your teen self like? What were their dreams and angst and magic? What would you all tell each other if you got to connect across time and space? In this embodied writing workshop participants will be allowed to invite their inner teen to the space and nurture and honor them with creative writing tenderness. Our adolescence and teenage-hood were seasons of discovery and exploration that helped develop us into who we are and dreamed of being. It was a time of life filled with sensation, curiosity, disappointment and first heartbreak as well as learned resilience. Through thoughtful embodiment and creative writing we will channel that part of ourselves and explore it on the page. So much can be discovered and healed back into ourselves with sweetness and playfulness. All writers of all experience, genres and interests are welcomed.
Auntie Pandora’s Box
CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITER, ERIN SHARKEY & PHOTOGRAPHER, TIA SIMONE GARDNER
Find sensory connections stuck between flat visual images and our remembering. Play with focus and blurring, cropping and dilation. In this workshop, explore your own personal archive to find snapshots in which imperfect timing perfectly illustrates a moment or a series of them and use photographic technics to break open opportunities in writing. For inspiration, we will revisit the moments just before and after time was frozen in our images. And by experimenting with sequence and narrative timelines and taking time to examine closely, we’ll create seeded notebooks, a handmade image journal, that will lead us to the beginnings of lyric essays.
Oracle and Intention in Creative Nonfiction
CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITER, ERIN SHARKEY
Sometimes, while writing from our personal experiences, it can feel like our memories dry up or are just out of reach. In this workshop, we will combine our well-worn moments of memory with chance to find new access points to remember the stories to serve as seeds for new writing and seek new opportunities to make meaning. We will create our own oracle boxes of reminiscences to draw from, incorporating personally meaningful historical touchpoints before diving in to see how randomization can equal inspiration.
Syntactic AutoTune: Writing Through Sonic Processing
POET, DOUGLAS KEARNEY AND SOUND ARTIST, DAMEUN STRANGE
From Dub and Trap’s reverb to Rock and Funk’s distortion, musicians and producers work many processes to create signature sounds that redefine their music. While listeners may perceive these effects as textures, they are actually transformations of signals and information. In this workshop, we examine how sonic processing—interdisciplinarily transmuted to writing techniques—can transform stalled drafts of poetry and sudden prose. We’ll apply “glitch,” “delay,” and other effects to our word-based composition processes and see what rocks.
All Hooks: Repetition and Revision FTW
POET, DOUGLAS KEARNEY
So, I was listening to Beyoncé’s “Formation,” trying to figure out why it caught my ear the way it did; then I realized, the whole song is a series of hooks, choruses, layered throughout the mix. Repetition is groove, loop, hook, a serious tool in Black aesthetic trickbags. In this workshop, we will engage elements of repetition: chime, pun, and recursive constraints to compose poems that move even when they seem to stand still, work refrain till it don’t stop, and catch you reading twice when you think you’re only reading once.
