Part of the Lawrence Public Library’s How-To Tuesday Series. Learn practices to journal for well-being, creativity, connection, and healing. More details TBA.

Community in Tune



Instructor: Alex Kimball Williams

A free virtual community workshop. Open to adults and teens. To register and reserve a spot, email us at: adastrawritingproject@gmail.com

Art is revolutionary. Communities engaged in art together create bonds & sustainable change. Join us for a workshop centered around the revolutionary aspects of music, particularly music played in groups. We will explore the ways music has shaped social & environmental movements, & learn how music can be a tool for community healing & cross-cultural understandings. The broader principles of TEK will be reviewed, as well as a dissection of the popular perception of Native peoples as extensions of nature. We hope this widens our community's understanding of these issues & provides a fun yet informative way to make music together.

Alex Kimball Williams is a multicultural artist, writer, speaker & scientist. Their work often focuses on cultural identity, ethnopolitics & natural sciences. Kimball Williams is the recipient of the 2018 MLK Dreamer's award, & they are also depicted in the Womxn of Color Mural installed on the Lawrence Public Library. Currently, Kimball Williams works as a consultant & researcher on issues of equity within public health, public education & policy. Whether it's performing protest songs, writing compelling articles or teaching about ethics, Kimball Williams radically stirs up their community with their multicultural & scientific approach to issues of social & environmental justice.

Reclaiming the Body

Instructor: Hannah Soyer

A free virtual community workshop. Open to adults and teens. To register and reserve a spot, email us at: adastrawritingproject@gmail.com

We include bodies in writing as a way to ground the reader, allow them to feel what the
narrator or main character is feeling, and make it easier for them to navigate the world we
have created. But what happens when the inclusion of bodies in a piece of text becomes
more than just a signifier of a person, but a subject? Can the physical and tangible be
reclaimed through the non-physical and intangible? What does it mean to write about
bodies, specifically when we come from marginalized identities? Join writer Hannah Soyer
in a workshop that explores these many questions and invites us to create our own bodily
narratives.

Hannah Soyer is a queer disabled writer interested in exploring representations of othered bodies. Her work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Entropy, Mikrokosmos Journal, and Hot Metal Bridge, among other places. She is a cat and chocolate enthusiast, and the founder of This Body is Worthy, a project aimed at celebrating bodies outside of mainstream societal ideals.

Language and Relationship: Games for Relationship, Writing, and Embodiment

Instructor: Brynn Fitzsimmons

A free virtual community workshop. Open to adults and teens. To register and reserve a spot, email us at: adastrawritingproject@gmail.com

While it’s easy to see writing as something we do in our heads, the stories we tell, the way we tell them, and the way we think about our relationship to them all happens in relationship and through our bodies. We’ll explore these and other aspects of writing, language, and community through a roleplay game called Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies. The game will ask us to notice language and how it evolves, creates, and reflects relationship or community, and, ultimately, how it dies. We will explore the concept of “lost in translation” within the world of the game and rethink the role of language in our own lives, sense of self, and community. The workshop will consist of both gameplay as well as guided writing exercises that will help us translate gameplay experiences back into the rest of our lives. There are no Gamemaster’s for this game, but if you are interested in helping to facilitate a group (familiarize yourself with the game beforehand in order to help keep gameplay moving), please email bfitzsimmons@ku.edu.

Brynn Fitzsimmons is a second-year PhD student in English – Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Kansas. Her research interests include medical rhetoric (invisible illness and trauma), feminist studies, and community-engaged pedagogy. She has helped lead Storyboard, a board game storytelling program at the Olathe Juvenile Detention Center, since 2017.

Join us for an evening of poetry, music, and performance, featuring Carmen Moreno, Alex Kimball Williams, and Amado Espinoza.

Carmen Moreno is an artist, poet, and performer who applies sensibilities of science to art, creating a visual language that transforms her emotional-intuitive experiences into innovative installations and performances. She explores the phenomenal experiences of mycelium by cultivating human relationship to fungi through art, happening, and identity. Moreno is also developing community-based education and interpretive programming to create and hold space for People of Color communities to collectively deepen their connection to the earth, land, plants, animals, ancestors, and cosmic narratives while preserving their own cultural histories.

Alex Kimball Williams, the person behind Bad Alaskan, is a multicultural writer, artivist & scientist. They operate within several groups, including BLACK Lawrence (Black Literature & Arts Collective of Kansas), Epicenter (East-side People's Intercultural Center), Girls Rock Lawrence & more. Whether it's performing protest songs, writing articles online or teaching cultural competence, Kimball Williams radically stirs up their community with their multicultural & scientific approach to issues of social & environmental justice.

Amado Espinoza was born in Bolivia, and recognized his love for music at an early age. Performing in his elementary band at the age of eight, by the time he was sixteen he was formally studying music at the Andrés Bello Institute and later the Conservatory Milan in Cochabamba, Bolivia. In 2000, Espinoza established the Museum of Musical Instruments for the Foundation Luis Ernesto of the Andes, housing over 500 pieces from six continents, and producing four albums for Tribu Kona, a world music ensemble that he founded. Between 2011-2012, he was in-house composer for the Circus Theatre El Tapeque, and composed music for the award-winning stage play Mocambo, among various commercial and independent productions. Amado has collaborated with many artists, most notably with one of Bolivia’s favorite rock bands, Oil.

+ A community open mic featuring new writing from the Voices in the Wind Writing Workshop w/ Carmen Moreno earlier in the day.

Voices in the Wind: Poetry, Nature, Song

Instructor: Carmen Moreno

This workshop will be a ‘Walk and Write’ as we head outside to listen to surrounding ecosystems. We will lend ourselves the sounds and orchestra of motion, considering the wind as the maestro of nature, bringing voice and song to plants, trees, leaves, water, and earth. Wind can often whisper to the ear and whistle its favorite tune. As rhythms ensues, we will look for inspiration in the landscape, and explore the memory of the land - as the planet turns and the voices of ancestral past flow through time.

We will explore the wind as breath and natural phenomena - using spoken word, rhythm, and prose for expression.

Free and open to the public.
Location: Meeting Room B
Bring a notebook/paper and something to write with.

Carmen Moreno is an artist, poet, and performer who applies sensibilities of science to art, creating a visual language that transforms her emotional-intuitive experiences into innovative installations and performances. She explores the phenomenal experiences of mycelium by cultivating human relationship to fungi through art, happening, and identity. Moreno is also developing community-based education and interpretive programming to create and hold space for People of Color communities to collectively deepen their connection to the earth, land, plants, animals, ancestors, and cosmic narratives while preserving their own cultural histories.

Join us for an evening of poetry featuring visiting TWANG Anthology poets Brody Parrish Craig and Calypso Jane Selwyn and local writer Izzy Wasserstein.

Originally from Louisiana, Brody Parrish Craig attended Hollins University where they received their B.A. in English & French. They recently completed their M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas in Poetry where they began writing their first manuscript, a collection of hybrid poems inspired by queer phenomenology, the Bible Belt, & recovery.

calypso jane selwyn is trying very hard to be a 19th-century Decadent poet except with estradiol & youtube let's-plays instead of opium and syphilis

Izzy Wasserstein is a queer and trans woman. She writes fiction and poetry and teaches writing and literature at Washburn University. Her most recent poetry collection is When Creation Falls (Meadowlark Books, 2018), and her fiction has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Transcendent 4: The Year’s Best Transgender Themed Speculative Fiction, Clarkesworld, Fireside Magazine and elsewhere. She shares a home with the writer Nora E. Derrington and a variety of animal companions.

+ A community open mic featuring new writing from the Disorderly Conduct Writing Workshop earlier in the day.

Disorderly Conduct: Activating TLGBQ+ Creativity Through Exploring Trans Erasure & Empowerment

Instructor: Brody Parrish Craig and Calypso Jane Selwyn

What does it mean to write a “trans poem”? How do we activate our creativity as writers navigating oppressive systems that impact each of us in different ways? What does it mean to navigate the space between inclusion & erasure, representation & tokenization? Where can we find current models of TLGBQ+ creation, considering the intentional lack of our representation in the literary canon?

Through discussing texts by TGNC writers currently in the literary community, the historical (or perhaps ahistorical) representations of TGNC narratives, and several generative writing exercises, we will navigate what it means to write toward TGNC liberation, empowerment, and broaden our creative & collective awareness.

Disorderly Conduct will center transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming writers in all workshop materials & its approach. While we are open to all, in order to center TGNC voices, we especially encourage cis-/hetero- participants to come most eager to listen.

Disorderly Conduct is a creative child of TWANG, a regional creative space/anthology for transgender, nonbinary, & gender nonconforming creatives who live throughout or are tied to the Southern & Midwestern US. For more on TWANG, visit our webpage at: www.twanganthology.org

Free and open to the public.
Location: Meeting Room B
Bring a notebook/paper and something to write with.

Originally from Louisiana, Brody Parrish Craig attended Hollins University where they received their B.A. in English & French. They recently completed their M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas in Poetry where they began writing their first manuscript, a collection of hybrid poems inspired by queer phenomenology, the Bible Belt, & recovery.

Crystal Boson writes short, dense poems that lay bare the complicated geographies of the United States and the lives of the Black, queer, and marginalized bodies that dwell within its boundaries. She currently writes about, and resides in the midwest. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, and was awarded the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in 2014. She has work published in Blueshift Journal, Pank, Parcel, among other locations. Most recently her work: the bitter map was selected as the winner of the 2017 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest by Saeed Jones.

Janice Lee is the author of 3 books of fiction: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), and 2 books of creative nonfiction: Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015) and The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the concept of han in Korean culture, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

+ A community open mic featuring new writing from Janice's generative workshop Co-Dependencies Writing Workshop w/ Janice Lee earlier in the day.

Co-Dependencies: On Healing, Remembering, Breathing & Writing Trauma

Instructor: Janice Lee

“What really exists is not things made but things in the making.” - William James

How are the frames of reference and relationships between and of living beings activated? That is, how do different bodies and worlds articulate each other, or, how do we learn to be affected? How do we reconcile personal experience with historical fact? How do we reconcile history with memory? How do we reconcile truths with other truths? How does writing open up space while processing trauma or grief?

We will explore the articulation of personal experience, identity, and trauma (both lived & inherited) and look at the relationship of personal history & identity with aesthetics & narrative. We will explore how the presence of unresolved corporeal history and the impossibility of articulation or expression leads to new encounters in language and narrative via various aesthetic writing practices. We will also explore notions of personhood and interspecies communication through exercises in seeing, writing, breathing, and sensing.

There will be writing prompts, guided meditations, intuition exercises, shamanic practices, divination, mapping, unbinding wounds & trauma, and communing with plant & animal beings.

Free and open to the public.
Location: Meeting Room B
Bring a notebook/paper, something to write with, and a rock or stone of your choosing.

Janice Lee is the author of 3 books of fiction: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), and 2 books of creative nonfiction: Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015) and The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the concept of han in Korean culture, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. http://janicel.com/