Writer’s Soul: Clarissa Pinkola Estes
This is a writing and listening class rooted in honoring a living lineage bearer and the soul work carried through story. The work centers Clarissa Pinkola Estés as cantadora, keeper of old stories, and invites writers to enter myth, ancestry, and psyche as sources of voice rather than technique. Writing here is not about craft alone, but about remembering how story carries soul, guidance, and collective memory.
Writer’s Soul: Merlin Stone
Merlin Stone was the author of When God Was A Woman, first published as The Paradise Papers, and of Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood. She studied art and journalism, eventually becoming interested in archeology through her study of ancient art. Her work had a serious impact on the Goddess Movement of the 1970s and 1980s and has given us doorways of possibilities to rethink the primarily male lens through which we are taught history.
Writer’s Soul: Jeanette Walls
This class studies memoir as a careful, relational practice. We sit with The Glass Castle and pay attention to how Jeanette Walls tells the truth without asking the reader to absorb her pain or make meaning for her. We look closely at restraint, pacing, and choice, how complexity can be placed on the page and trusted to stand on its own. Writing here becomes an act of witness and clarity, allowing sharp edges to exist without explanation. This class meets writers who are ready to tell what happened and trust the intelligence of their voice.
Writer’s Soul: Audre Lorde
This is a writing and listening class rooted in Audre Lorde’s insistence that language is a site of power, survival, and truth telling. The work centers her voice as queer, Black, feminist, and uncompromising, inviting writers to meet their own words as living forces shaped by body, grief, love, and responsibility. Writing here is not separated from politics or soul. It is understood as a way of telling the truth of one’s life in relationship with the world.
Writer’s Soul: Octavia Butler, The Oracular Role of Writing Into The Future
Octavia Butler teaches us how to write from inside the future without leaving the present behind. In this class we sit with her life and her work as a living practice of imagination, responsibility, and truth-telling. We pay attention to how she wrote herself into worlds that did not yet exist, how she held fear, power, collapse, and possibility in the same breath, and how her stories continue to speak long after they were written. Writing here becomes a form of listening forward, a way of placing the self inside collective becoming without losing the edges of what is real. This class meets writers who feel the pull to imagine differently and to write in service of what wants to live.
Writer’s Soul: Joy Harjo
This class sits inside Joy Harjo’s way of listening to the world. We move through her poems as landscapes shaped by breath, memory, grief, and belonging, paying attention to how voice carries responsibility to land, ancestors, and spirit. We stay close to the tenderness and ferocity in her writing, the way image and truth travel together without explanation. Writing here feels devotional and grounded, guided by what has been carried forward and what still needs a voice.
Writer’s Soul: Mary Austin’s Wild Voice
This class sits inside Joy Harjo’s way of listening to the world. We move through her poems as landscapes shaped by breath, memory, grief, and belonging, paying attention to how voice carries responsibility to land, ancestors, and spirit. We stay close to the tenderness and ferocity in her writing, the way image and truth travel together without explanation. Writing here feels devotional and grounded, guided by what has been carried forward and what still needs a voice.