Divorce, like war, is hell. But divorce is also an opportunity for growth and exploration. Exploratory personal writing is a challenging and healing way to usher in the second (or third) act of your life...one that is rich with potential for new ideas, new experiences, and new ways of being in the world. Through weekly discussions, writing exercises, and readings by Nora Ephron, Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Lamott, and William Ernest Henley, Magda Pecsenye and Deesha Philyaw will facilitate this 12-week writing workshop for women. 

The writing exercises and readings for this workshop have been selected to show different ways of writing through pain and writing into growth, and to stimulate creativity, imagination, and a sense of possibility.

The discussions and writing exercises in Writing Through Your Divorce are adaptable to whatever stage you’re in in your divorce process.  We invite you as a participant to do the writing exercises that sing to you, the ones that make you say, “That is so ME! How did they know???” Do the ones that scare you, the ones that your mother, children, or favorite aunt would never forgive you for writing.  Write the ones you cannot write.  Whether you’re looking to write memoir, short stories, a novel, or none of the above...this workshop will help you mine the material of your life and get started.

When you give yourself the space and time to write your feelings and experiences, you come out of them with more clarity, more peace, more confidence, and written pieces you'll be proud of. 

This workshop is for:

*...women at all stages of divorce.  Whether divorce papers haven’t been filed yet, or the ink has been dry on your decree for a while now, this workshop is for you if you have something to say.

*...women who are getting divorced from someone of any sex or gender.

*...women anywhere in the world who have internet access

*...women who self-identify as writers and are looking for a structure and permission to write about divorce, the process, and themselves in a specific, intentional way.

*...women who have never written before and who want a structure to tell their stories and work out their emotions through the process of writing.

This workshop is NOT for:

*...someone seeking the kind of instruction that is typical of a traditional writers’ workshop experience. If you’re looking for instruction and critical feedback on your writing we can recommend some fantastic workshops, conferences, and retreats. This workshop is about processing through writing, not mechanics.

*...people who are afraid to write.

*...people who identify as anti-divorce and who aren’t willing to see divorce as, among other things, an opportunity for growth.

*...cisgender men.  If you are a cisgender man interested in this workshop, contact us and we’ll see if we can pull together something like this for men.

The details...

When? 12-weeks, beginning September 29, 2014

(There is no such thing as "missing class." Since it's all online, if you're gone for a week on vacation, just jump back in where you left off. ) 

Where? worldwide, online, private discussion forums + one introductory conference call + 3 monthly Gchats

How much?  $399 through September 15, 2014, $499 after.

Who? You and other women writing through the process.  Consider taking a workshop with a friend.  We need a minimum number of participants to hold the workshop.

This is the structure you've been looking for to help write what serves you.

Ready To Sign Up?

The early-bird price is $399. The regular price is $499.

When we receive your payment we'll send you the welcome email with the workshop schedule, books to buy, and information about logging in to the course platform.

Workshop Weekly Topic Schedule

We broke the workshop into weekly topics so we can spend enough time on each topic for you to consider both what it means for you and how--and if--you want to write through it. Again, since it's all online, you're not missing class if you go on vacation--just hop back in when you return. (Or log in from your vacation if you consider writing as much fun as we do!)

Week 1

Topic: Beginning: Writing as a way of processing emotion, the importance of the act over the product, beginning your story (not at the beginning)

Week 2

Topic: Forgiveness: Forgiving yourself, forgiving others

Week 3

Topic: Anger: We’re used to managing anger, but what happens if we just let it go and ride it like a wild donkey instead?

Week 4

Topic: Loss: What have you lost? Even if you didn’t want the actual relationship, divorce is filled with loss--of possibilities, of a path you thought you were on, of an ideal, of principles. Processing it includes both accepting and pushing back against the ideas and realities of loss.

Week 5

Topic: Depression and Other Mindbenders: A change this big can bring with it depression or other states of mind that distort reality or your ability to think clearly at a given moment. How do you know what’s real and what’s false? How can you appropriate that disorientation to serve your writing and write your way through the fog?

Week 6

Topic: Essentials: Who are you? Divorce, for many, is a “season of losing.” When you have almost nothing left, what do you still have left?

Week 7

Topic: Self-Determination: The phoenix, Kali, “bloody, but unbowed”...how you express your sense of being unsinkable after coming through the shaking of your world view

Week 8

Topic: Letting Go: Sometimes you just have to say “What the fuck?”  Or, in other words, “You gots to chill”--Erick Sermon.  What happens when you just take your hands off the wheel and make it all ok, even for a little while?

Week 9

Topic: Sex, Money, & Religion: Ch-ch-ch-changes, turn and face the strange...

Week 10

Topic: Mothering: How do we mother our children when we, ourselves, need to be mothered through this process? How did our own mothers and their relationships affect our marriage and divorce? How do we get what we need for ourselves and from ourselves as mothered and mothering people?

Week 11

Topic: Bonds: As the marital bond dissolves, others come into relief

Week 12

Topic: With a Bang, Not a Whimper: We’ve all read things that completely grabbed us all the way through and then just ended with Bobby Ewing coming out of the shower. How do you maintain your own voice, your own mode, and the same pace of action while ending in a way that honors your divorce story?

***

Who We Are

Magda Pecsenye has been writing the parenting advice website AskMoxie.org since 2005, in which she focuses on problem-solving and integrating parenting with the rest of ourselves. She writes When The Flames Go Up, a blog about co-parenting after divorce, with her ex-husband, and writes a blog for Huffington Post Divorce. She has been one of Babble's Top 50 Mom Blogs for the past three years, and has been interviewed and mentioned in the New York Times, Globe and Mail, Parenting magazine, Parents magazine, and Redbook, and has appeared on Good Morning America and HLN Prime News. She writes and coaches parents about strategy and change, and consults on strategy, marketing, and media for entrepreneurs and small businesses. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI, with her two sons. 

Deesha Philyaw is a Pittsburgh-based freelancer who writes about race, parenting, food, and pop culture. Along with her ex-husband she is the co-founder of co-parenting101.org and the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Children Thrive in Two Households After Divorce (New Harbinger). She has appeared on CBS's The Early Show, and her writing has been published in Essence and Bitch magazines, The Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, and The Washington Post. Other recent work includes contributions to the collections When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children's Classic and the Difference It Made (The University of North Carolina Press), Motherhood Memoirs: Mothers Creating/Writing Lives and The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat (Roost Books).  Deesha is an adjunct professor in Chatham University's Master of Writing program, and she has taught adult writing classes at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.  In 2012, she received a Flight School Fellowship for artist professional development from the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts/Pittsburgh Filmmakers.  She is a remarried mom and stepmom to four daughters.

We are excited about this workshop and can't wait to work with you!

Sign up now: 

The early-bird price is $399. The regular price is $499.

When we receive your payment we'll send you the welcome email with the workshop schedule, books to buy, and information about logging in to the course platform.

Questions? Email us at askmoxie at gmail dot com or Tweet us at @DeeshaPhilyaw or @AskMoxie.