#SplitThisRock2016 Sessions: Trauma, Violence, and Healing

We are pleased to present a selection of sessions on themes of trauma, violence, and healing at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness.

For the full festival program, please visit the program page here.And hey: Pre-registration is open now until March 31. 

Restorative Poetics

Photo by Kristin Adair.

Samiya Bashir
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 101 [Map]

Friday, April 15 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Humanity on trial in digital space. Inexhaustible violence of -ism and image. We’ll consider the power of poem-making to metabolize aggression out of our bodies, to reclaim and restore humanity, and more. We’ll explore an alchemical poem-making toward transmutation of experience, insight, and approach--collaboratively and individually--toward resolution of swarming aggressions into light, into recognition, into direction, into sustenance. We’ll come with all we carry. We’ll leave with new poems, new maps, new seeds.

In This Skin: A Writing and Performance Workshop
Aimee Suzara
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Gallery [Map]

Saturday, April 16 9:30am – 11:00am

"Every organ has a consciousness," wrote Akira Kesai. And Sekou Sundiata said, so aptly, "it all depends on the skin we're livin' in." The body is our nexus of joy and pleasure, as well as the nexus for historical trauma, erasure, and exploitation. This writing and performance workshop will allow participants to explore how to begin writing from the body, while addressing attitudes about the body, including perceptions and expressions of beauty, race, gender, sexuality, and ability/disability. Participants will explore and develop gesture and text through guided writing, theater, and movement exercises and create a short piece. Given recent events in which the destruction of Black bodies has been most visible, and the historical trauma experienced by many people of color, those of colonized histories, and women, the workshop has special timeliness and relevance. It is a part of an effort to remember, heal, and transform individually and collectively.

Trauma Narrative: Writing As A Way of Healing
Liz Alexander
Human Rights Campaign Room 105 C [Map]

Saturday, April 16 9:30am – 11:00am

This workshop will examine how writing, as a medium, can be used as a coping strategy and self soothing technique for persons who have experienced psychological and emotional trauma.

In this context, trauma is a term used to describe experiences or situations that are emotionally painful and distressing, overwhelming one’s ability to cope, invoking feelings of powerlessness, and impeding the normal functioning of one’s life. Through the use of exercises, the workshop explores how writing can serve as an outlet of expression, as a meditative practice, can be a space of safety and validation, and is a tool for processing and reinterpreting traumatic experiences. I also highlight several different modalities of writing, i.e music, spoken word, journalism, and memoir. The trauma narrative, or the “act of telling a story,” is an effective therapeutic technique for survivors of trauma and this interactive workshop serves as an overview of that process.

Won’t You Come Celebrate: A Meditation on Violence(s) in Poetry
Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, Aaron Samuels, Danez Smith, Jamila Woods
Human Rights Campaign Equality Forum [Map]

Saturday, April 16 2:00pm – 3:00pm

Photo by Kristin Adair

Borrowing its name from the iconic Lucille Clifton poem, this panel will bring together poets to discuss how they deal with the portrayal and exploration of violence in their work. Urban violence, sexual violence, genocide, and other forms of traumatic conflict will be explored as source material and inspiration for poetry. The poets will present how these conflicts figure into their work and influence both content and form. As artists, educators, and young poets of color, the members of the Dark Noise Collective will engage with questions of ownership, resistance, healing, and the white gaze.