I'm teaching a free writing workshop

+ a little update because it's been forever

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Big thank you to everyone buying and reading my new book ❤️‍🔥

I’ve received so many heart-wrenching messages sent along with book orders, but I’ve honestly been floored all week by this one.

Thank you for being our voice, when it’s a life’s journey to recover it and most of us can’t get there.

I know the truth beneath these words so intimately. I know the repression around incest is so thick that most survivors stay silent for a lifetime, bringing these secrets with them to the grave—while many others keep their memories entirely repressed, shielding themselves from pivotal details of their life story when their survival entails forgetting. Owning the story, let alone speaking it aloud, is rare, and I know how near-impossible it was to recover my own voice. Yet the reason this message floored me was because I don’t even feel like I’ve recovered my own voice yet.

To be told I’m functioning as a voice for other survivors was an unmooring wake up call. I felt a familiar shame bubble up reading those words, because I so desperately want to do justice to the depth and scope of this topic, and I fear my small, very incomplete contribution is far from enough to represent others. I’m not trying to be self-deprecating; it’s just the reality. I have not come anywhere close to writing the entirety of my own story alone. My book contains ten essays I wrote that are just a few drops in the ocean of a story that is incredibly difficult to put into language. Yet somehow, given how rare it is to speak on this topic at all, I’ve become one of the leading voices—even when I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.

I used to dream of the day I'd finally write a full-length expose that travelled through all of the nooks and crannies of my story’s labyrinth, painting all the characters and scenes in striking detail, revealing all the truths I’d kept hidden for so long in a masterpiece memoir. I thought I’d make progress on that this year. I did not. Writing about this topic still feels immensely difficult for me, and this book is not That Book. I wrote these essays with no intention of them being a book. These were essays that sprung forth from me suddenly, unexpectedly, on a few rare days last year that I felt like I could break through the silence. I didn’t think I’d ever print them. I thought only the eventual "masterpiece" would be worthy of printing.

But that doesn’t exist yet, and I’m honestly not sure if it ever will. I’m quite frankly still living in terror and find long-term project planning challenging. I haven’t been able to write much at all in recent months and the “full story” doesn’t seem to be writing itself any time soon. Yet I still felt a sense of urgency to get the story out, however imperfect, unintentional, or incomplete.

As I impulsively compiled these old essays, it felt almost sacrilegious to be throwing together my first book after-the-fact like a scrapbook. I approached this with an “it just needs to exist” attitude. I didn’t edit the essays. Moving along the process, I continually asked myself, "Why don’t you wait a few more months, at least, and write some new material before publishing this?” I knew I wanted to produce quality work, and I heard echos in my head of voices from the literary scene who speak of the importance of sitting on work until you have something of true quality to share.

But I didn’t want to wait. Or rather, the story itself didn't want to wait. It felt like an emergency. When it comes to writing about incest or other social crises, you don’t always have time to wait. Just get the words out while you can. Worry about the “art” later. Beauty isn't the point. It’s about distributing a map for survival. So yes, while my ego told me to wait until I had a masterpiece to share, my nervous system—the one who carries my own map for survival—knew better, knew that survival is never guaranteed, knew that this is in fact an emergency.

What are the ethics of waiting to chisel a story into perfection in the midst of an emergency?

Maybe I’ll live another 10 years, at least, probably. Or maybe I won’t. And if I die any day now, I needed to know this story existed in the world, even in an incomplete form. Sure, I could blame this sense of urgency and impending doom on my unhealed nervous system. But I’d like to think, having survived incest, my nervous system accurately comprehends this crisis inside and out—and can accurately assess the urgency with which this story needed to be shared.

I’m honoured that, in all its imperfection and urgency, my voice is able to speak for other survivors who haven’t yet recovered theirs. But I’m not content speaking for others—I don’t want anyone to be living through this in silence or secrecy or amnesia. I want our voices and stories to weave and build upon each other, firmly and solidly enough to change the culture. I want to help others recover their voices, and I want to recover deeper layers of my own.

So, I’m teaching an hour-long workshop called Words as Witness: Writing for Incest Survivors to help others embark on this journey and begin writing their stories. I was invited to lead this workshop as part of the virtual Healing Through Writing Festival happening April 14-17th. I was a bit scared to say yes, as I haven’t spoken publicly in a long time, but it feels like a step in the right direction that I dearly hope can be generative and supportive for other survivors. Writing about this topic is hard. Any words that manage to make it out are precious. We need your stories.

While this writing workshop is centred around the intricacies of incest, you don’t need to be an incest survivor to take this workshop. You just need to have a story inside of you that wants to be written. Anyone is welcome. And if you can’t make the festival, I’ll be putting up the recording on my website.

You can listen to the recording here.

P.S. I’m going to start releasing new writing again very soon, I promise! Things have just been wild ever since my book came out. Thank you, thank you, thank you again.