Permission and the importance of telling your story now.
UPDATED 2/19: Join me this spring in person and online to talk about the right and urgency to tell our stories.
PLEASE NOTE: I have added additional workshops to the list below. I would love to see you there.
I can recognize it from a thousand paces: my response to anxiety, trauma, worry.
My lack of words.
I revert to my childhood at times like this, as many of us do: I hunker down, pull the covers over my head, and sleep probably far too much (there is a very fine line here, regardless of what the sleep gurus say). I don’t want to go outside, which is a problem because not doing so rips away one’s agency — meaning: the feeling of one’s body moving through time and space on one’s own steam despite the push/pull of external forces — as I have recently heard Dr Bessel van der Kolk say. Times like this paralyze me in almost every way: creatively, emotionally, physically, even nutritively. I forget to take walks, to use my writing hours wisely, to be an attentive partner and a good friend, and even to eat well, if at all.
Permission to write our stories is the first thing that is taken away from us in the name of power and control both public and private.
Like many women, I run the risk of responding to what is currently happening to our world the way I might when the unthinkable, or unspeakable has happened.
The unspeakable.
There are so many of us — and I do not use this word lightly; I don’t like this word at all because it is far too overused — who are triggered by the well-executed plans and intentions of others, meant to create chaos. Plans that are designed to leave us staring, gape-mouthed, into an abyss that is meant to wrest control out of our hands and lives as though we are powerless children who first stamp our feet and cry NOT FAIR before freezing in place like a yearling left under a shrub to hide from danger. Mary Karr says it well:
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down….Our little cracker box of a house could give you the adrenaline rush of fear, which means more frames of memory per second. (The Paris Review, The Art of Memoir No.1, Issue 191, Winter 2009)
When I read Dorothy Allison’s Skin in the mid-nineties, I knew I could no longer afford to stay silent, because it was silence that was expected of me, silence that would keep me in my place, and silence that ultimately would be the death of me. There is power in telling our own stories, in reclaiming our narratives from those who have tried to silence us, she wrote, because it is the unspeakable that is always counted upon. Fifteen years before I read Skin, I was lucky enough to have a professor — now a dear friend and the woman to whom Permission is dedicated — who, when I was an eighteen-year-old Boston University freshman (glazed over like a donut at having finally escaped a home where everything was upside down, all the time), assigned us Adrienne Rich and Helen Yglesias in the first week of class. My head spun. And I came to understand this fact: story — writing the truth — is what will save us whether what we write sits in a folder buried deep in a closet, or makes it into the hands of others who might recognize themselves in it, be transported by it, be soul-saved by it.
There is power in telling our own stories, in reclaiming our narratives from those who have tried to silence us — Dorothy Allison
Permission to write our stories — to tell them however they will be told — is the first thing that is taken away from us in the name of power and control be it public or private. It is what we are made to believe we have to ask for lest a particular, perhaps uncomfortable truth — benign or not — be revealed. When we take that permission back and make it our own, it is as though our glasses have been cleaned and handed back to us; we see the world more clearly, and the world sees our eyes, wide open and bright.
In the coming months, I will be talking to a lot of you about Permission, my book that is coming out in March. Borne from the questions What am I allowed to write, and if not, why not, and how do I short-circuit the anxiety that is the foundation of story control and ownership, Permission is about unpacking the command for silence. It is about moving from a place of fear to a place of transformation, and of freedom from the constraints of that fear in all its forms.
Please join me in the discussion.
Events
WORKSHOP: KRIPALU - March 28th- March 30th: Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create - A WEEKEND WORKSHOP FOR EVERY WRITER AND STORYTELLER AT EVERY LEVEL.
Join me for a beautiful Berkshire weekend of learning how to move beyond the constraints of permission and story ownership-related fear to a place of profound awareness that the stories we carry are ours and make us who we are. Come with a willingness to unravel issues of truth and permission on the page, and an acknowledgment that the impulse to tell one’s story must be honored. This is for writers and creatives at every level. Kripalu is a magical place, with gorgeous walking trails, amazing yoga classes suitable for everyone (daily yoga classes are included), quiet time for meditation and journaling, and truly delicious food. Go HERE to sign up.
Connecticut on Saturday, March 1st, my Permission book events will begin with a launch at the Hickory Stick Bookstore in Washington Depot, Connecticut, where I will be in conversation with Kerri Arsenault, author of the award-winning Milltown, a memoir that marries her personal story of life in small town Maine to the deadly environmental disaster that has unfolded there for decades.
WORKSHOP: Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, March 3rd - April 21st. This is an online workshop, and you can be located anywhere. Permission and Memory: The Intersection of Place, Time, and Story Ownership. Go here to sign up, or for more information.
I will be at Brookline Booksmith on Tuesday, March 11th, in conversation with Joanna Rakoff, author of the bestselling memoir, My Salinger Year. Please note: this is a ticketed event.
On March 15th, I will be at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC, at the Union Market Location.
I will be at Byrd’s Books in Bethel, Connecticut on Sunday, March 23rd.
On March 27th, I will be appearing at a pre-event at the Southern Vermont Writer’s Conference in Manchester, VT, in conversation with Caren McVickers.
March 28th-30th: A PERMISSION WEEKEND AT KRIPALU (SEE ABOVE)
April 4th-6th: I will be appearing at The Woodstock Book Festival in Woodstock, New York.
April 8th: Book Club Bar, in NYC - I will be in conversation with Sari Botton, author of And You May Find Yourself, and founder of Oldster Magazine.
April 9th: Rough Draft, Kingston, NY: I will be reprising my conversation with Sari (!)
April 22nd - 23rd: Visiting Writer Series at The Porch, Nashville, TN. I will be in conversation with Claire Gibson, and also teaching a separate masterclass.
WORKSHOP: Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A SPRINT WORKSHOP: Do I Have the Right to Tell My Story? — LIVE, 12 pm - 3 pm, via Zoom. Does fear of public or private response to your story hobble your ability to write it with clarity? Join me in a three-hour seminar on giving oneself permission to transcend the fear that keeps vital stories from being written. Participants will learn how to short-circuit the creative paralysis that comes from being told that we don’t have the right to tell our own stories, and how to get to a place of transformation, of freedom from the constraints of shame and fear in all their forms, and to the understanding and recognition of the ethics of art-making, truth-telling, and creative soul-saving. Go here to sign up, or for more information.
April 30th - I will be in conversation with Laura Zigman, author of the bestselling Separation Anxiety and Small World at Porter Square Books in Cambridge MA.
May 9th: Gibson Fay-LeBlanc and I will be in conversation at Print Bookstore in Portland, Maine, in collaboration with Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance
August 7th: I will be at East End Books in Provincetown, MA.
I will continue to add dates as they become available, in Rockland, Maine; Rockport, Maine; and the west coast.
I hope to see you.
x
crossing fingers and toes you might consider coming even further north, to Toronto... XO
Elissa, when I heard you’d be leading a workshop at Kripalu in 2025, I just knew I’d need to figure a way to get there. The last time I went to Kripalu was in 2022 for a workshop with Cheryl Strayed, six months post leaving the only job I ever loved—public librarianship. I’m the woman who took my grief on a bikepacking trip and showed up in Maine, a few months after that CS workshop, to the circle of women you and Katherine May led through the comfort workshop in the barn. I left there knowing the story I have to tell had been silenced long ago, and my health was suffering because of the shame. I left my job because I wanted to create a new life for myself, forge a new identity. One that’s more courageous. It’s now 2.5 years later and I can report that I’m doing it but not without its costs. Yet the gains are far more satisfying. I look forward to joining you and the other courageous creatives in the magic of the Berkshires next month. Thank you for writing this book. I cannot wait to read it! 🙏