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/