# Join a new Inner Community Writing Workshop, starting October 2023

## Summary
Some people experience ourselves not only as individuals, but also as internal communities. We explore the worlds within us in many forms, and one of the most powerful is writing. **The Inner Community Writing Workshop is a weekly online group for people who use writing to explore our internal multiplicity.** We have three primary goals:
1. **To support each other’s writing practice**,
2. **To develop our craft**, and
3. **To pursue healing and liberation in community**.

Here are the basics:

- **How much?** No cost.
- **For whom?** Folks who experience themselves as internally plural, have an existing writing practice, can commit to weekly meetings, and are curious about other systems.
- **How many?** Between 4 and 12 participants, ideally.
- **Who’s this?** [Ash Chudgar](#ash) (he/him or they/them), who’s organizing this group.
- **When and how?** Starting October 2023, weekly, over video call, at a time that’s convenient for the participants.

Interested so far? Read on for details.

## What you’ll get out of the Workshop
This group is for folks who are looking for three things:
1. 🙌 **Support for your writing practice.** You’ll have a consistent weekly excuse to talk about writing in a supportive community. We’ll help each other cultivate and sustain a writing practice over time.
2. 🛠️ **Developing your craft.** By engaging deeply with other people’s work and having frequent opportunities to share your own, you’ll get to play around with new forms and techniques for exploring your internal world in writing.
3. ❤️‍🩹 **Pursuing healing and liberation in community.** Writing about your inner community can help wounded parts of you heal, facilitate accountability and reconciliation after internal harm, and help liberate your inner society from shame and other forms of oppression. As you use writing to pursue healing and liberation within your own system, you’ll also be helping the the rest of us heal and get free as a community. And together, we might discover ways to pursue healing and liberation in _all_ the communities we’re part of, at every scale.

This workshop is different from other writing communities in important ways:
- 🚫 **Publication isn’t the goal.** Some of us are quite likely to publish work we create for this group, and that will be wonderful! Others of us may never share what they write beyond the Workshop itself, which is also perfectly fine. Writing for publication, in any form, is *not* an expecation or a goal.
- 🚫 **This isn’t a critique group.** We will undoubtedly learn a lot about technique from each other — and simply writing a lot is likely to help us all write more and better. But in the Workshop, our shared goal isn’t to help each other become *better writers*, but to *use writing better* to explore our inner multiplicity, whatever form that exploration may take.

# What we’ll all have in common
Ideally, we’ll be a wildly various group of people with a few important things in common. You’ll
- **You experience yourself as internally plural,** whatever that means to you. Many folks who fit this description identify as a [plural system](https://pluralpedia.org/w/System), a collection of ego states or alters, or otherwise internally multiple. Many others (like the organizer) got in touch with our inner multiplicity through the Internal Family Systems model. *This group is for plural folks only.*
- **You can commit to the Workshop reliably.** Because our writing will put us in contact with each other’s delicate inner ecologies, we need to be able to count on each other to show up in community, week after week, with compassion for each other and our systems. Of course life happens, nobody’s perfect, and we’ll give each other ample grace. *This isn’t a group to dip in and out of casually.*
- **You are committed to your writing practice,** whatever that means for you. You might be a published author, a faithful scribbler of "[morning pages](https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/)," a compulsive diarist, a famous blogger, a secret poet — the form of your commitment to writing is all your own, but your commitment to the practice of writing should be deep and abiding. *This isn’t a good place to try writing for the first time.*
- **You are very curious about other systems.** The real magic of the Workshop will happen as each of us gets to explore other systems than our own — not only each other’s internal communities, but also the external communities we participate in too, at every scale from the microbial to the municipal to the intergalactic. *This isn’t a group for people who just want to focus inward.* (If that’s what you need at this point in your healing, consider hiring an [IFS coach like me](https://www.chudgar.com/coaching).)

# About the organizer
I’m **Ash Chudgar** (he/they), and I’ve been exploring my own internal system in writing ever since I discovered its existence in 2020. In the years since, a couple dear friends have joined me in sharing our writing about our inner worlds. By now we’ve learned so much from each other’s work, and found such healing and freedom in the process, that we want other folks who are similarly inclined to join our community. Because my system adores bringing people together around language (and enjoys tidy administrative work), I’m the one who’s organizing the group.

Learning to practice the IFS model got me in touch with the members of my inner community, and over time I’ve come to conceptualize myself as something like a [median system](https://pluralpedia.org/w/Median). When I’m not writing about my inner world, I [practice as an IFS coach](https://www.chudgar.com/coaching) and a [communications consultant and writer-for-hire](https://www.chudgar.com/consulting). A decade ago, I spent a dozen years thinking and teaching about poetry, fiction, and philosophy with college students in Chicago and Saint Paul. Today I live in [neuroqueer](https://neuroqueer.com/neuroqueer-an-introduction/) contentment in Northeast Minneapolis, where I share a home with my husband, [outdoor birds](https://birds.haikubox.com/listen/348518973538), and indoor cats.

# How the Workshop will be structured
## Basic framework
We’ll agree on our community’s norms when we begin meeting, and make shared decisions according to them. Because it’s helpful to have a structure to work with beforehand, here’s what I’m proposing at the outset:
- **Weekly meetings.** We’ll meet weekly by video call at a day and time we’ll agree on together, for an agreed-upon length of time. For the sake of consistency, we won’t reschedule in any given week to accommodate anyone’s schedule particularly.
- **How we’ll read.** The group will read up an agreed-upon amount of one member’s writing each week, prior to our meeting, and arrive ready to discuss it according to our community norms.
- **Kinds of writing.** Unless we agree otherwise, the writing we share with each other can take any literary form at all — fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, anything. That said, it must be:
- **written by the person or system who’s submitting it.** (Citations and quotations are just fine, as long as they’re attributed appropriately.)
- **written primarily in English, and provided in a text-only format** (plain text or Markdown) for accessibility.
- **preceded by a brief content warning** to help other folks prepare our systems for what we’ll encounter in it.

## Idea of a schedule
Here’s how I envision the group working form week to week, where N is the number of participants:
### WEEK 1: FORMING COMMUNITY
In our first meeting, we’ll adopt community norms for:
- how we want to relate to each other,
- the amount of writing we want to read per week,
- kinds of content we want to be warned about,
- handiest form for reading each other’s work,
- deadlines for submitting work for the week,
- how to schedule who submits when, and
- guidelines for feedback and responses.
### WEEKS 2 through N+2: INTRODUCING OUR SYSTEMS
To begin, we’ll each submit a piece of writing that introduces our own system to other members of the group, one at a time.

### WEEKS N+3 AND BEYOND: IDEAS
Once we’ve all introduced our systems, we can move on to supporting each other’s writing in whatever ways make sense to the group. If we decide to work with topics and prompts, here are a few that might be interesting:
- Put our inner systems in dialogue with other systems at other scales (microbial, municipal, galactic, etc.)
- Create works of praise or thanks to a an unsung hero in our inner worlds
- Explore a tension between two or more of our parts using the tropes of genre fiction
- Write a brief skit that dramatizes an important historical moment in the development of our internal dynamics

These are just a few ideas — I’m sure we’ll come up with many, many more together.

### ENDING
The group will end when we decide it’s run its course, whenever that happens to be. Like everything in the world, this group will arise, abide for a time, then pass away.

# Join the Workshop!
If you’re interested in joining the group, just fill out this quick form to let me know! I’ll get back to you quickly. And if you know other folks who might be interested, by all means send ’em to this page. Thanks to all of you!