Writing With Feminist History:
A Course in Transformations
The premise of Writing With Feminist Histroy is that writing in order to challenge existing narratives and to birth new (and ancient) stories is a challenging spiritual, emotional, psychological, and intellectual journey. Your writing—if it is being created to transform your reader—will also certainly transform you first.
This course is is 8-weeks of specialized support for your unique writing goals and the transforming vision you are gestating. It is for writers taking risks; who are breaking status "quo stories" (in the words of Dr. AnaLouise Keating); and who write from a place of believing we are part of collective change.
What and Who is This Course For?
Writing With Feminist History is for clients who are amidst the heart and soul growth of a writing project, a life journey, or course of study involving writing. It is especially helpful for those desiring to grow foundational frameworks for writing that intersects the personal and political—a central connection made by feminist writers.
Is this service for academic writing projects?
While this service is not for academic projects, for many writers this work can be intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually rigorous. The course stretches our categories of analysis and perception. The readings and writing practices support the conscious and unconscious labors of personal and cultural change, grief work, and ancestral healing.
Is this spiritual work?
Yes! This support is aligned with projects and writers who value creative mentorship that is attuned to spiritual reflection and intersections of healing and cultural change. But you also are most welcome if you do not feel spiritual connection/practices in your life. Everyone's path is treated with respect and care.
Is this for social justice informed writing?
Yes. But we also question how we get to justice and what creates change.
Our work will expand your capacity to write in ways that account for your own and others' embodied experiences of injustice (like white supremacy, ableism, patriarchy, colonialism, class domination, and climate change). Simultaneously, we root into foundational cosmologies of interconnection. We pay attention to the importance of identity and lived and embodied experiences, but we also question contemporary identity constructs, philosophies, and discourse when that is generative to do so.
Why is the word transformations important to the work?
Good question! As you write, receive feedback, and revise with the support of the course exercises and teachings, we are honing in on the journey of transformation you are designing for your reader—while also being attentive to nourishing your own transformation that you must undertake to become the vessel of the writing.
original artwork by Nancy Guerrera, WildHeartArtStudio
The course and coaching support structure provides writers both synchronous & asynchronous components.
The Components
Choose the Level of Support: First, you decide if a 1:1 coaching program or a small group (of 2-3 writers) is best for your needs. The course, whether done in a 1:1 format or small group, is 8-weeks long.
Live Class Sessions: Class times are offered every two weeks on MONDAYS, September 11-October 31 (exceptions made for Yom Kippur). Classes are 75-minutes for 1:1 clients and 100 minutes for small groups. Writing homework is submitted for review 24-hours before class. Feedback on the writing homework is provided within the live class.
Asynchronous Support Between Class: Each week also involves participants sharing audio reflections on their writing process with the course exercises. This is done over the Signal App.
Additional Support for 1:1 Clients: In addition to the live sessions and on-going Signal check-ins on their writing process, 1:1 clients have one mid-week check-in point for feedback on THURSDAYS specifically on their course writing exercises. Thus, 1:1 clients receive four live sessions and eight additional rounds of feedback on their writing exercises (or, 12 total rounds of feedback in 8 weeks).
The Philosophy of the Creative Collaboration
We frame our work with an understanding of how your writing project or life goal is part of a larger change/awakening on the planet—an awakening in pursuit of movements toward systems of care, flourishing, justice and accountability, love and liberation.
To that end, we get to the deep heart of your project, goals, and writing practice: What are you called to birth? What environments and epistemologies will support the birth? What is the emotional heart of the work? What is the central "taboo" or "contradiction" or question the writing is exploring? What is at stake in its question? What writers/researchers do you need to be thinking, feeling, and sensing with as you do your own work? Who is your audience and how will you build bridges for them to journey with you?
We also discuss the lived realities of protecting and nurturing your creative process amidst a world that exhausts many of our bodies and executive function. The single hardest part of writing for many people is not the writing but paying their rent in a capitalist society—meaning, what is draining them is capitalism (and patriarchy and racial supremacies), not writing. We acknowledge the impact of these realities. And, we put our focus to how writing can be a source of energy and power, especially and even amidst the chronic exploitations of people's life energy in other realms.
Questions For Your Writing and Revision Process
What feelings come up for you when you are in front of a blank page? And, can you feel the intuitive way of knowing pulsing as the heartbeat of your unique writing voice?
Where might you give yourself permission to make more connections, take more risk, and layer juxtapositions of "incongruent" ideas or categories?
How can you root more deeply in the intellectual, creative, and spiritual lineage you are citing, building on, or intervening in? What research and reading would benefit your intellectual and spiritual toolkit as you write?
Where might you deepen your analysis of interconnected systems and structures in order to make this project more hospitable and alive to more readers?
What spiritual, ritualistic, or contemplative practices support your ways of knowing?
How can you tap in more deeply to the role of the senses and body in writing and accessing subconscious knowledge?
What would individual and collective healing look like for you as you journey in this project?
Bio
Kimberly B. George, Ph.D., is a scholar in the fields of feminist studies and ethnic studies, with additional graduate training in religious history, contemplative/mystical studies, and relational psychodynamic theory.
Her academic research focuses on the kinds of writing practices that birthed new fields of knowledge. She is published in multiple scholarly and journals and websites, and she is the co-editor of the book Football, Culture, and Power.
Dr. George completed her PhD and MA in Ethnic Studies at University of California San Diego. Prior to this, she was a 2-year doctoral fellow in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. In addition, she holds an MA in Religious History from Yale University/Divinity School, summa cum laude, where she was a Merit Scholar and postgraduate fellow. She has studied counseling psychology at the graduate level and holds a BA in English.
Read about her approach to writing practices in her Syndicate review of Living a Feminist Life
"Sara Ahmed’s latest work, Living a Feminist Life, dismantles the false divide between academic theory and the embodied world in which our concepts come alive... It is an intervention not only in academic feminism, but also an invitation to rethink (and, indeed, re-feel and re-sense) the writing and reading practices we are relying upon to translate the sensuality of life into the conceptual structures of language."
CLIENT STORIES
A client was working on a narrative essay for a scholarship application. His draft read as flat and un-alive. In one session with Dr. George, he learned not only what makes a narrative powerful, but even more important, he was guided by a set of Dr. George's questions to write his own story in a vidid, memorable way.
He rewrote the essay guided by Dr. George's consultation and customized writing exercises. He brought the emotional heart of the piece alive and won the $20,000 scholarship. The scholarship committee told him his essay was one of the most memorable they had read (and that is why he won)!
Dr. George didn't herself write or edit a word of the essay. She just midwifed the alive, embodied narratives inside the client's inner wisdom.
STUDENT REVIEWS
"Dr. George has an organic way of asking questions that get to the heart of your writing project. Her approach is unlike any writing workshop or editing that I have experienced. She both challenges and encourages the writer to be bold. The value of her feedback and method are unparalleled."
—Dr. Wolff, Prof. of Religious Studies
“I am still reaping the fruit from that inspirational class [Writing From the Body]. As I progress in my work as an artist and scholar, I am awakening to what you would talk about in class—the violence against women's voices and bodies. I am learning to navigate through this new consciousness.
—Dr. Chrissy Espina, Medical Practitioner & Educator
CLIENT STORIES
A client went back to get their PhD in their 40s. With Dr. George's assistance in the writing and research process, the client was admitted and secured $80,000 worth of educational funding over 4-years of the doctoral program. The client's life changed in astoundingly powerful and beautiful ways.
A tenured professor had received multiple rejections for placing an article in a top journal in their field. After working with Dr. George, the article was accepted and was one of the journal's most downloaded articles of the year.
A client working in business shared that her work with Dr. George helped her find her voice not only professionally, but also in her marriage.