The Value of Sharing Our Story

Writing the Personal starts tomorrow

Dropping in at the end of the week to invite you to Writing the Personal, my three week class that starts TOMORROW to bring the poetic, personal, and political together for essays of self discovery and service

with guest teachers

Fariha Róisín

and

Anna Fusco

Sun Dec 3, 10, and 17 9-11am PST / 12-2pm EST Live on Zoom Bonus 90 min sharing our writing workshop lab Wed Dec 13 10AM PST / 1PM EST

Payment plans and scholarships available - Can’t make it live? Every session is recorded and sent out within 24hrs with lifetime access + Closed Captions provided

Photo by Ellen Rutt

I hear my students, readers, and friends say all the time - I don’t want my writing to feel navel gazing or like I am talking about myself too much, citing this as a reason for not focusing on folding in personal narrative with business and service. I turn towards one of my favorite essays, Melissa Febos’ In Praise of Navel Gazing from the book Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.

“Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me. I believe that stories like these have the power to transform the world. That is the point of literature, or at least that’s what I tell my students. We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of survival to each other.”

Melissa Febos 

So what is a personal essay? What is narrative non fiction? Where do we put it and how do we shape it? This is what we’ll discover over the next few weeks in the zoom room. Spending the last thirteen years writing the personal for the public has been :

An act of liberation 

Storytelling 

Truth telling 

Shape shifting 

Oral history 

Archiving 

A way to relate to others 

A way to tell the story of ourselves or our projects, practices, and businesses 

I believe that weaving together our stories into what we share publicly is a beautiful practice whether you are working on a book, a newsletter, or wanting to share thoughtful writing in the email marketing for your business. Writing is a portal to the people and the possibilities are endless.

There is a value beyond measure in being brave enough to write about what we see, what we find, what we fear, what we hope for, what we long for, and what we know to be true. The value of sharing our own stories from the margins so that we may stand together in times of great adversity is something writers have been doing since the beginning of time. We are here to tell the truth, let’s find ways to do that together.

This is printed out and hangs in my studio, something I always return to from Poetry is Not a Luxury is Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider

Writing the Personal is a place to bring your full self, even if you don’t know what you want to write about yet. There will be plenty of time to map that out, and over our few weeks together we will find the ways to weave it all together. I don’t know much about the technique of writing, that is not the kind of teacher or student I am, but I do know what it is like to live as a writer and to let it be the container for my own self discovery and be a gift to others. See you tomorrow. In ease and hope.

⌇⋰ Website

⌇⋰ Email : info@marleegrace.space

⌇⋰ PO Box 252 Cedar, MI 49621

P.S. Not interested in class and want a free resource for getting started? Check out the Creative Ideation Portal - a 3 day guide for visioning your projects and bringing them into the world. And as always, let me know if you have any questions.