Even though I am currently having some new health challenges, great abundance is afoot. I reconnected with my yoga teacher from LightHouse for the Blind. Nancy Yates adapts her yoga classes for seniors, veterans and all sorts of folks in the disability community. She has started offering sessions in my neighborhood--at the Ed Roberts Campus . As soon as I walked into Nancy's class, I was filled with new light. She always speaks of our "peach encrusted hearts". Hers is most certainly goldeny-coral topaz. Nancy and Write To Connect (me!) have made plans to team up and offer a 2 hour Saturday workshop for Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program . It will be held March 24 at the ERC fitness center and we are calling it Poetry in Motion . There will be yoga exercises, poetry read aloud and embodied writing exercises. W2C may also be collaborating with friend Mg Roberts, a Bay Area writer and mom-extraordinaire. Mg and I would like to create w...

This post is so very long overdue! In late October, I did a reading from my book of collaborative poetry at Humboldt State University. My collaborator, Denise Leto, also a woman with a disability, has a friend who teaches  at HSU. This friend--Janet Winston--started out as a grant writer for the Special Olympics and now lectures on Virginia Woolf at HSU and piles on extra blankets and feeds me at all hours of the night when she is hosting. I am so grateful to Janet and Christina (another professor with a disability at HSU) and to all the students from the Critical Race, Gender and  Sexuality Studies dept who hosted Denise and I. The CRGS students shared their work in an open mic format after D. and I read. Much of what they offered focused on hidden disabilities and mental health issues. These CRGS students are stirring up a new niche of disability culture in Humboldt. Their writing was very exciting  Here are a couple examples: Elizabeth Hassler Fuck you, and I am w...

I am moving in to full time work at the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco , which comes with increased responsibilities and new opportunities to build programs that support folks as they transition out of nursing homes or endeavor to find new assistive tech gadgets to help with every day life. In line with that, I am putting W2C on a semi-hibernation, so that I make sure I am getting my rest (a key component for somatic writers...). But, by semi-hibernation, I really mean just intermittent naps for W2C. As autumn turns to winter, expect to hear more about a W2C class being offered to the Veterans Art Guild (an artist collective for vets with PTSD and other disabilities) and W2C classes at different venues very near to downtown Berkeley BART. My hope for the coming months is also to turn W2C toward my palmetry practice, "to experiment with narration as a mode of light touch" (Bhanu Kapil). I will off...