I lead, they teach

This is the line that came to me last week during one of the Wild Writing classes I run.

I have three live, in person, flesh to flesh classes here in Northern California, and four that take place on a video platform, which allows women from across the country to join me at 8am on a weekday morning – all of us in little boxes on the screen just like The Brady Bunch. We can’t make actual eye contact, but we can see each other as we write and read aloud for an hour and a half each week. Given the possible coldness of technology and the occasional glitch where someone gets kicked off their server, it’s a pretty incredible way to do deep this work with people.

I lead, they teach

All my classes are amazing. Some of my students are grandmothers, some are single women, others are married, some have small children, some are going through menopause, divorce, a few have lost spouses, two are cancer survivors, a third has just finished her chemo treatment, one has a memoir coming out next month, and some regale us each week with stories of their Tinder dates. It’s a glorious mix of the female species, a weave of womankind and it’s incredibly intimate. We do our best to tell true stories, to lay down an authentic line and to reveal ourselves to one another. It’s healing, and not just for them, for me too.

I lead, they teach.

I have this one Wednesday morning class. Dona has just finished her chemo. She lost her hair and her eyebrows and she’s made it to class most Wednesday mornings even though she doesn’t always feel great. All season long she’s been writing about her cancer and what that rocky edge is like. She writes about her four and a half year-old daughter Stella, and how the tone in Stella’s voice has taken on a kind of concern in these last few months. I’m in awe of Dona’s courage, and I feel incredibly blessed to have each and every writer in that class, as well as Peggy and Alyssa, two cancer survivors who listen to Dona’s stories, nod and sometimes even smile. They smile because they understand and they remember losing their appetites and losing their hair and because they’ve come through the other side – which I have to think does wonders for Dona. If I had cancer, I’d want to hang out with survivors.

I lead, they teach.

We write from poems that I bring to class, and last week we used this beautiful Liz Rosner poem called Finding a Home For My Body in the World. The jump off line I gave the writers in all seven of my classes was, “When will I learn to see the art of the body, each with its own perfection, even my own?” I choose these poems for myself. I need these lines. At 55, I’m sorry to say that my own body issues still loom large. I haven’t worked that shit out. I’m still thinking I should look different, still negotiating how much I can eat and how hard I have to work to deserve what I get. And although there are plenty of women in the classes that know exactly what I’m talking about, there are also a big handful of them who are healing. Last week I heard stories from my students about taking their bodies back, owning exactly the way they were. Stories of women who were tired of this old skinny story and who were starting to change the narrative for themselves, and yes, find a home in their own bodies. I listened to them and I realized, holy shit, without realizing what I was doing all those years ago when I started these classes, I have surrounded myself with some of the deepest, wisest women I can imagine. I have created a community of not only incredible people, but people who are showing me how to live, how to heal, how to listen and how to love.

I lead, they teach.

We’re mirrors for one another. Our lives have different details, we’re hitting different stages at different times, but we understand one another. The women with small children read their stories of exhaustion, while those with older children listen and nod. When Penny lost Richard, her love of 20-years, I told her that she could write about Richard every week, and she did, for two years. Some day someone else from the group will lose a love and they’ll remember Penny’s stories and how she got through it. The two women going through divorce this year sat at the table with women who’d already been divorced and who were happy again, who had found their new footing. If it sounds like therapy, it is and it isn’t. We don’t chitchat, we don’t stop the writing to talk about our feelings or go down the hole with someone. We just write and we read and we listen, and that’s enough. A cancer story is followed by a Tinder story, which is followed by a sleepless night story of a toddler gone wild, and which is followed by a story about loneliness in the midst of a marriage, which is followed by a story about the best lemon pie ever. Seriously. Each story is a thread and they all fit together in the fabric of women’s lives.

We laugh, we tear up, and we shake our heads at our amazing lives – sometimes sad, often surreal, but woven together. And we leave the table with a little more faith in our own ability to make it through another day, at least I do.

If you want to read more from some of my Wednesday students, check out the amazing Peggy Nolan, Dona Bumgarner , and Alyssa Phillips.

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