Unsilenced Woman

Can you hear it? Your body’s call. Sometimes it’s only a whisper.

Maybe you find yourself in a time of transition with your body. Or you’re wondering how to be present with yourself while the world is hurting and asking for our collective attention.

Maybe your body has been nudging you with little signals, like a message from a friend— “hey, can we talk? I’d love to catch up soon.”

Maybe you feel the change of the seasons in your bones, and the slowing and quieting of winter is pulling you toward skeins of yarn and the dark knitting of words.

Whatever your story, wherever you find yourself, we gather soon to connect with our bodies through writing. There is something rich to discover there.

🫀✨Unsilenced Bodies Online Writing Retreat ✨🫀
with authors Abigail Rose Clarke
and Catherine Simone Gray
Oct. 26-26
$45 full price, $27 if you sign up with a friend
Link in the bio for more info & to register

We will gather for two sessions on:
Saturday, October 25: 11am - 12:30pm EST / 10am - 11:30am CST
Sunday, October 26: 5pm - 7pm EST / 4pm - 6 pm CST

Recordings will be yours if you can’t make it live, although we’d love to see your faces if you can.

All bodies are welcome, and all levels of writing experience or inexperience are encouraged to join us.

What a big-hearted six months!

Think about the collective web of people having conversations about how we tend to our powerful and messy bodies postpartum, how we reckon with the ways past abuse shows up in our mothering, and how we find ways to reconnect with our pleasure and our erotic selves when our bodies and spirits are hurting—or changing and confounding.

Think about the garden of people coming together to write toward care, connection, and pleasure. Fingers on the creative pulse, voices vibrating.

That was us. We did that. We’re doing it. I couldn’t do this alone. I wouldn’t want to.

Thank you to everyone who bought the book, came to an event, sent me a message, wrote a review, shared your favorite passage in your stories, hugged me at a restaurant and said you just finished it, and on and on.

if you want to continue expanding the impact of PROUD FLESH, you can…
✨order the book or audiobook (link in bio!)
✨add it on your Goodreads or Storygraph
✨write a review so more readers can find it
✨ask your local library to order it
✨recommend it to a friend
✨share about it here on social media (tag me plz)
✨reach out if you know a podcast that you think would be a good fit

I am ever offering thanks for all the support. Sending you so much love as you work your magic in the world too 🌎🦋🐍🌹

P.S. It’s fitting that I took that 6-month book milestone picture 15 days ago and am only now sharing it. That’s how it went with the baby milestones, too, (fast and furious!) and the rainbow blanket still has yellow spit-up stains 💛 But it’s never too late to stop and reflect on the power of how you move through the world. I hope you stop and consider the ways you are already shifting the conversations, making way for others, and growing into your fiery purpose. It’s necessary to sustain the energy to keep moving forward.

One of my favorite days of the year is coming next week: The Mississippi Book Festival! A dream day for book lovers.

I’m honored to be a panelist and thrilled for all the conversations and hugs that will hold us. The energy is always electric and sustaining on this day when thousands gather to celebrate the power of stories. Come see us on Saturday, September 13 in Jackson!

📚Mississippi Memoirs panel
🕰️ 2:45 p.m., Galloway Reception
✍🏽 Signing at 4:15 p.m.

🧡🦐Also, to my COAST friends: I’ll be at the Mississippi Book Festival Coast Kickoff on Thursday, Sept. 11 at 6 p.m. at I would love to connect there and get the book party started!

🧡📖Mississippi Memoirs panel description:

Within the complexity of broken places—wounded bodies, fractured families, divided communities—these memoirists trace journeys toward integration and healing, revealing how we reconstruct identity from fragments of trauma, love, and resilient hope.

Come dip into intimate space with your writing for seven days. We’ll perch at varied vantage points to be with the mystery of where your pleasure, your nourishment, and your life-heat are moving in your days (and nights).

We’ll lean toward the sensory world and the weird whispers as we slow down to notice what’s alive in you this season as the world serves heat and grief abounds. One foot in pleasure.

🌑SUMMER BODIES, SUMMER FRUITS 🌕
🌹A one-week writing prompt cycle by email
🥀FREE, in honor of my nana
🌗We begin on Monday, August 25, the six-month anniversary of my memoir Proud Flesh.

Invite yourself. Invite a friend. We are already 75 strong to write this week! The creative power of a group is real and ripples out. Let’s “make art in the face of f**k,” as author says.

🌙Come write along and see what you discover. Link is in the bio.

Yesterday I celebrated 38 years of life on Earth. With my first book out this year, I feel like I’ve had enough celebrations in six months to equal five years’ worth of birthdays. Affirmation upon affirmation of life and love expanding. Heartbeats fast and slow.

Looking back, I find myself drawn to the blurry photos of my year. The ones out of focus between the still frames. The expressions sliding into shared words and laughter. A quality of movement and merging presence. Places where the pixels smeared.

My eyes closed; more beauty opened. We posed, and then the pose fell apart. Truth slipped through the shapes we planned and the smiles we knew. When I see the rounded edges of 38, I see infinity doubled and cracked open. I feel it too.
:::
Yesterday also marked the one-year anniversary of my nana’s death. I was with her last year on my birthday as she transitioned beyond this world. My mom and I held her hands, three generations of breaths in and out. Until one of us moved into the forever-exhale. Even that moment blurred—“Is that her last breath? Oh wait, there’s another.”

My birthday will always hold birth and death for me now. Both sides. I am thankful for what I have witnessed in this sacred knot, my arrival and her departure and every messy and mysterious place between.
:::
As we also approach the half-birthday of PROUD FLESH, I’ve been developing a project from this tender juncture of celebration and grief in this season. Here’s a first glimpse and invitation for the curious. I’ll share more tomorrow.
:::
🌑SUMMER BODIES, SUMMER FRUITS 🌕
🌹A one-week writing prompt cycle by email
🥀FREE, in honor of my nana
🌗We begin on August 25, the six-month anniversary of my memoir Proud Flesh.
🌙Come write along. Link is in the bio.
:::
Thank you for being here and for helping to make this year and this life so beautiful. I send you my love.

Summer’s had me under its big magnifying glass, heat waves in responsibility city in These Times. Exhausted edge days of pickled pool thumbs when the house can’t hold my summer children, with business calls looped into diving board calls of “Mama, rate my cannonball between 1 and 10! No, 1 and 100!” We’re circuiting between 1 and 100 daily, aren’t we? Eleven feet down in the deep end, toes on the vinyl, scritch-scratch on my soles, bubbles floating up. July days of mechanical bulls, no horses. Sun glare on oil leaks and fuel leaks and radiator leaks. Mosquito smeared on my ankle with my blood. But y’all know me– I never get too far from a river of honey even though the ants march by that sugar too; I’ll risk one sting on my toe, a little ouch with my sweet.

On a July Friday, I stole away to Atlanta for one night with my friend Morgan, cut my cut-offs shorter, painted my nails trucker blue, and got peach pit sticky sweet. Hats, chaps, and my nana’s ashes inside my gold locket. Wore the fringe leather jacket my aunt bought me in my Woodstock phase, which finally found its highest calling after twenty years of U-Haul trunks. “Look at that horse, look at that horse, look at that horse.

It’s hard to describe the power of dancing and singing with 70,000 people in the middle of a majestic artistic vision come true. To be part of the unfolding. The chills when all of our wristbands lit up at the same time after the message flashed on the screen: “Never ask for permission for something that already belongs to you.”

I made new international friends in the 2-hour-long merch line, and the blue-eyed Cowboy Carter tee slinger knows how to speak honey too. When I waffled between the red and blue jersey, he said with a smile, “See, I’m struggling– because I know no matter which one, you’re gonna look cute.” Full eye contact. Hours of rapid-fire sweat and card-chip cha-ching couldn’t wear him down!

Note to myself and maybe you need it too: Even though you’re tired, even though it takes work and planning, show up in the places that remind you who you are and that we’re in this together. It’s worth it. And no matter which one, babe, you’re gonna look cute.

The words above come from a letter I wrote to author Molly Caro May’s email list about how we first came together for this erotic and sensory work. Our artist love letter exchange is on Molly’s Modern Mammaling Substack; read the whole thing (link in the bio) for a glimpse of “the raw material of artistic friendship,” a story of freely giving and receiving.

Now we invite you into the creative energy with us, exploring pleasure possibilities together. This is our whole-hearted offering to you:

✨Your Erotic in Uncertain Times ✨
90-minute workshop on WEDNESDAY, May 28
9:30 MT | 10:30 CT | 11:30 ET
Virtual, the recording will be sent afterward

We need space for embodied imagination and creative play. We need space where we can tend to what feels good. Especially when times are shaky and hard.

🌹Come if you are at a threshold or a transition.
💧Come if you feel uncertain and unsettled and want to hold onto your mammal self still.
🌹Come if you’re curious about your erotic.
💧Come if you feel tension between pleasure and hardship.
🌹Come if you are comfortable with pleasure but you want some new angles or insight.
💧Come if you love to write; or you don’t write at all.

🩵Join via the link in my bio. Come if it calls to you.

$35
**10% of proceeds will go to , preserving and sharing LGBTQ history in the Deep South.

Radiant friends out there, I’ve been quiet here recently, but I’m dipping my toes back in to invite you to something exciting.

Author Molly Caro May and I are creating a space to turn our curiosity toward the erotic, even amidst chaotic and painful times. Especially then, especially now.

Let’s get together for a sensory-rich morning of tuning into pleasure through writing.

✨Your Erotic in Uncertain Times✨
90-minute workshop on WEDNESDAY, May 28
9 am MDT | 10 CST | 11 EST
🌀Virtual, recording sent afterward 🌀

Molly and I have crushes on each other’s writing—okay, I had a crush on hers first. Her memoir “Body Full of Stars: Female Rage and My Passage into Motherhood” was a force of massive inspiration for my own memoir Proud Flesh.

We both wrote unwieldy bladder stories of postpartum reckoning and “sewing [our] womanhood back together,” (her words). Organs shifting. Tissues healing. Old, old wounds demanding attention.

But we both chose to tell those stories textured with the grooves of beauty and pleasure.

This is some rich, rich territory of body and language shared between us, and we’re honored to hold space for you in your explorations too.

🌊How do we tend to our life force, our erotic, in times of transition? What is the role of pleasure in supporting us through uncertain times? Where do we seek pleasure intentionally and where does it surprise us? What does your particular shape of the erotic look like, sound like? 🌊

This workshop will be a space of embodied imagination on the page, of coming into deeper intimacy with what feels good as a resource that’s always here for us. Let’s explore together.

$35 *
*10% of proceeds will go to , preserving and sharing LGBTQ history in the Deep South.

🐚 Join us via the link in my bio. Hope to see you there!