Time-Travel and Move Forward with Memoir Writing Workshops ✍🏾
Inviting you with Love and Curiosity
Dearest evolvers,
I couldn’t wait until Season 4 to share some lovely happenings with you. I am getting to co-facilitate
’s legendary and life-changing Memoir Writing Workshops.
Before I write more about them, let me pull up some words from my favourite writers —
Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —”
Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Toni Morrison: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
Lucy Calkins: “I used to think that we write memoir when our lives are done and we want to give one last, loving look back, but now I know that it is by looking back that we create our lives, our selves”
adrienne maree brown: “writing shapes and reshapes the world, even if the words are simply rearranged dreams, visions, confessions, truths. matter doesn’t disappear, it transforms. we are of it, we shape it. writing so hard that the truth comes forth changes the world, and it changes the writer.”
One year ago, this is how I applied for the same workshop, as a keen participant:
Hello.
I would love to participate in the Memoir 101 Workshop with Natasha Badhwar.
I have been writing essays on Evolving & Enough for two years. It still feels like I'm scratching on the surface of my conscious, censored, polite mind whereas a deep underworld of memory, desire, and dream awaits to be explored. I intuit that the workshop with Natasha will help me reveal and record how my brain and body make sense of life, and deepen my writing practice.
That was me turning the keys to my own locks.
I could access the beautiful underworld, the recesses of memory that were stashed with stories of all shades, and found so much spine in my back as I wrote and share them. I fell in friendship with my fellow writers, a warm and empowering group beyond my wildest imagination.
Not only did I grow as a writer, but as a teenager in her thirties, as a woman, as a human being. I let go of secrecy and told the truth more often. And surprisingly, a memoir writing workshop coaxed me to be more present.
I have also been on an enriching journey of facilitating writing since 2017. After I shared about my workshop for teens, some of you reached out, inquiring about workshops with adults. Perhaps you helped me manifest this!
I’m madly grateful that Natasha has invited me to share more of this magic/medicine with more people. I hope that you consider joining us in this gathering of people and tender stories. I can’t wait to know you, read you, and write with you. If any doubt or worry makes you hesitate, do reply to this email.
Your underworld awaits.
Your stories need air, water, sunlight.
Your memories need compassion as much as your future needs hope.
With love and curiosity,
raju
Read more about the workshops here:
PS: I’m excited to be on Substack Notes:
This sounds lovely, and I'd like to share it with some of my friends writing nonfiction. I clicked through to the information, but which time zone do the class times represent? I want to calculate what time that would be for the various time zones in the United States.