We’re back!
The Writing Sessions space is under reconstruction after a year-long hiatus while I was doing some major healing and integration. If you’re on the mailing list, you know what I mean. Even folks who’ve been around are meeting this version of me for the first time, so hi hello hey ya’ll heyyyy!
From the jump, I created writing sessions because writing is often a maddeningly lonely activity and I didn’t believe in suffering in silence. After participating in a number of writing spaces and workshops, I wanted to offer my own—but with a major shift. Instead of focusing solely on the writing itself, I focused on the writer: the human being in a sweet little Zoom square on our desktops who found a way to give their feelings a microphone.
This necessarily meant that everyone who attended a writing session & shared their words aloud received detailed, deeply personal feedback from me (Kelly)–immediately after sharing. As in, you share and then BAM, there I was with instant insight & affirmation. And I was, like, really good at it. Still am. Just ask these folks.
The folks who showed up *really* showed up and we started calling ourselves a community, with everyone getting a say in how the space was facilitated. Soon, I started offering up to four writing sessions a week. For those of you who can math, that’s eight hours of writing + feeling +affirming per week, all for the low low price of FREE.
After five months of offering free sessions, I began charging on a sliding scale from $4-16, still well under the going rate for similar spaces. There were anywhere from 4-20 folks attending and each time, I was writing new prompts and providing instant feedback. It was, in a word, beautiful.
And it was, in another word, exhausting.
Entrepreneurs are often driven to create for others what they have been missing themselves and, while I can absolutely understand why, it isn’t sustainable. It’s like I expected to be fulfilled and healed by facilitating and holding space for others, and I began to feel resentful of the choices I was making–resentful that no one was coming to save me from the circumstances I’d created. So I took a break from facilitating, hoping to return to the space with renewed energy and a refreshed perspective.
A full year later (time is fake, pass it on), here we are, wondering what it could be like to hang out with rad folks on the internet again–but this time, we’ve done the actual work of extracting our worth as humans from the services we provide, and we’ve set boundaries around our time, energy, and being as humans! WHAT A CONCEPT!
You’ll notice an updated FAQs section on the Writing Sessions page that’s meant to provide as much information as possible about the way I’m approaching holding the space. In addition, when you register, you’ll be invited to collaborate on our Space Agreements, which are the guidelines for how we engage with one another and ourselves in the space. If there’s something you’d like to add that will help you feel safe in the space, go for it!
I’m commited to holding ethical and responsible space for ya’ll that honors our lived experiences and my own capacity, so that means I’m relying on both my own boundaries AND your feedback. Together, I think we can make something beautiful.
Hope to see you in a sweet lil’ Zoom square soon <3
Register for a writing session here!
