“She was writing beautiful stuff, but she wasn’t pretty.”
-James Hopper
A mystic and a clairvoyant who claimed to have predicted the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
An early feminist and activist alongside Indigenous and Spanish neighbors.
A woman known to wear gray prison gowns while writing or wandering around in white dresses with her hair flowing free.
She wrote that a woman with her love life “would have gone mad or bad or committed suicide. I have been very near the last many times.”
A poet who traveled 150 miles through the desert in her third trimester.
A flawed and wild and unhinged and hungry artist.
A struggling, disembodied mother.
A young bride to a man who manipulated, lied, and drove them into debt and poverty.
A novelist who used her first book to leave her husband and live by the sea.
While writing The Land of Little Rain, she says “Two tall, invisible presences came and stood on either side” and that they returned every time she wrote. “I suppose they were projections out of my loneliness, reabsorbed into the subconsciousness when the need of them was past.”
We’re channeling Mary Austin’s deep love of nature, of wild and barren places. We’re standing in the soil of a life that should have had more options. We’re looking gently, yet honestly, at her many mistakes and at the harm she left in her wake. We’re unfolding the story below her story - the one of women who are married off young and only discover the trap of it all too late. We’re reviving the hunger for aliveness that drove her into the desert again and again. We’re grieving the sad life of her daughter, and we’re standing at that young grave with the flowers her mother should have filled her life with. We’re writing as ones who have also been stuffed down into small lives and nearly burned down the world to claim bigger ones. We’re writing ourselves out into the desert, out into mountains with personalities and sunset colors that make us rethink everything we’ve believed about art.
This class will be an exercise in writing in the style of Mary Austin. I’ll teach you a little about her life so that you know where to place your feet and then we’ll conjure our own thorny, sparse histories to write about Nature and too-thin love and our brutal mistakes and what we want to change by grit and by grace from here on out.
If you found yourself tapping into your own story in new ways while writing through January’s class, this one will be a doorway all its own. Don’t miss the stunning energy of writing and workshopping together.
11 am PST
12 pm MST
1 pm Central
2 pm EST
8 pm Germany + Denmark
11 pm Dubai
If you enjoy this class check out these classes in the Writer’s Society Library:
How To Create A Trauma Informed Writing Practice with Megan February
Hunting the Viper King
And these classes in the Red Tent Library:
Descent, Initiation, and Transformation
The Shapeshifter
On Behalf of Gomer
The Red Thread: Belonging to the Wild and Wise Mother
Deconstruction and Decolonization with Malialani