WORKSHOP by JOHANNA HEDVA
Autohagiography: I Am My Own Ecstasy, Suffering, Love, Pain, and Magic, And I Will Write About it in the Face of Those Who Tell Me Not To
Sun, June 5, 2016, 2-5pm
Women’s Center for Creative Work, LA
$35 Members / $45 Regular (max capacity is 20)
** if $$ is a problem, email the WCCW directly or message me, we have scholarship spots, and workshops are NOTAFLOF (no one turned away for lack of funds)!
This is a writing workshop that holds space, bears witness, journeys through the underworld, and finds empowerment in the dark. A space for those with mental illness, chronic illness, disability, neuro-atypicality, difference, trauma, wounds, sensitivity, visions, vulnerability, and/or the feeling of being all too permeable, to tell the stories, the magic, the poetry, and the knowledge that their bodies and souls hold. A space to honor, respect, excavate, articulate, and illuminate.
Autohagiography as a genre emerged in response and in resistance to hagiography (“the lives of the saints”): the religious texts written by literate, male priests that described Medieval women’s mystical experiences. It’s no surprise that the official Church-sanctified texts, which declared these women to be saints, also fetishized, censored, omitted, edited, and significantly altered the source material, as it was told by the women themselves. Autohagiography, then, is the taking back of one’s own seemingly ineffable experiences: the writing of your own body, emotions, ecstasies, and sufferings, especially when they are messy, de-legitimized, incorrigible, don’t follow the rules, and take you to a different place than the one you’re supposed to be.
Johanna Hedva is an anticapitalist psychonaut nonbinary sorceress, who is a fourth-generation Los Angelena on her mother’s side, and, on her father’s side, the granddaughter of a woman who escaped from North Korea. She has been attached to a grand total of seven ICD codes (International Classification of Diseases), all of them deemed “incurable.” She is currently at work on This Earth, Our Hospital (Sick Woman Theory and Other Writings), excerpts of which have been recently published in Mask Magazine and GUTS. This work was first presented by the WCCW in October 2015, as My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want it to Matter Politically.
This workshop is Hedva’s last public U.S. appearance of 2016.