Foundation Level: Story Archaeology

Embodied writing practices to free your voice, hone your creativity, and support your commitment to the work.
 

Practice 1: The Writing Altar and Spell Work – Activate intentions for your success.

Practice 2: Body, Land, & Ancestors – Access somatic wisdom to retrieve your full writer’s voice.

Practice 3: Wisdom Writing – Open to soul healing and radical expression.

Practice 4: Energetic Accountability Practice – Work with the moon’s cycles to enliven your commitment and progress.

Practice 5: Writer's Black Book Practice – Collaborate with the Spirit of your Book.

Practice 6: Claim Your Author Identity – Consciously align your mindset and beliefs to step into purposeful power.

Practice 7: The Art of Storycraft – Experiment with new writing techniques and learn to weave narratives into a compelling story arc.

 

* Once you are enrolled in Author Up! or Memoir Lab, you will have access to these Somatic Writing community classes to supplement your writing for the duration of your program. 

 

Intermediate Level: Author Up!

Create sacred structure to lay the groundwork for your book and get you started on your Author’s Journey.

 

Practice 1: Your Big Why – Define your one reader and core reason for writing the book.

Practice 2: Honoring Resistance – Address energetic uncertainty through archetypal writing practice. 

Practice 3: Writing at the Rate of Your Nervous System – Tend to your own wellbeing as you plumb the depths of your story.

Practice 4: The Metaphysics of Memoir - Identify the life language of your book.

Practice 5: The Embodied Outlining Process™, Part 1 –  Create a working Table of Contents.

Practice 6: Invite & Invoke – Draw your reader into connection with a powerful prologue.

Practice 7: Deep End of the Ocean – Dive headlong into story to write your first chapter.

 

Mastery Level: Memoir Lab 

The Path of Sacred Completion. 

 

Practice 1: The Embodied Outlining Process™, Part 2 – Outline the body of the book with Fire & Bone Stories, a Fascia Story, and Shimmering Images.

Practice 2: The Writers’ Workshop – Give and receive constructive feedback on selected pieces of student writing.

Practice 3: Immersion in Craft – Deepen your relationship to literary technique. 

Practice 4: Story Titration – Balance narrative threads and your writer’s inner voice through multidimensional storytelling.

Practice 5: Mapping Your Big Story – Track and discover the deeper layers of meaning and story through explorations of structure, the integration of editorial feedback, and intentional revision. 

Practice 6: Transcend the Solitary Writer Stereotype – Write, grow, and celebrate your accomplishments with an engaged community in a dynamic, private online workspace. 

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Your Teachers and Coaches

 

Tanya Taylor Rubinstein – Founder, Story Alchemist, Lead Coach/Mentor
Master story coach, Tanya Taylor Rubinstein developed Somatic Writing as a way for her students to become embodied writers. By holistically retrieving voice, untethering power and writing stories, they are able experience profound personal connection to their work. She is the editor of The Cancer Monologue Project (MacAdam Cage).

 

Courtney Reed-Marsh – Story Alchemist, Lead Teacher, Editor, Somatic Writing Coach
Courtney was trained as a fiction writer, with a deep love of myth, a publishing industry background in personal story-based nonfiction, and experience teaching writing at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. They thrive in the liminal spaces where well-honed craft comes together with image and metaphor, lived experience, and collective knowing to bring great storytelling to life.

 

Cooper Lee Bombardier – Guest Writing Teacher: Structure & Craft
Cooper Lee Bombardier is a writer and visual artist and the author of the memoir-in-essays Pass With Care, a finalist for the 2021 Firecracker Award in Nonfiction. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at University of King’s College and in women, gender, and sexuality studies at Saint Mary’s University.

 

Debra Rosenman – Somatic Writing Coach
Debra traverses the wild terrain of soul as a writer, poet, developmental editor, and the author/editor of the multi-award-winning book, The Chimpanzee Chronicles: Stories of Heartbreak and Hope from Behind the Bars. As a book midwife, she helps clients fully embody their writing, digging deep into the emotional depth and rich marrow of their life stories.

Jonathan Mack – Somatic Story Coach
Jonathan holds a double BA in Religious Studies and Writing from Naropa University, and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has worked as an editor in the US and Japan, assisting large and small presses, translators, authors, and students. Jonathan’s editing practice centers on encouragement and precision as essential and indivisible qualities, each in its own time. He emphasizes what he, himself, needed most to learn: that you are not disqualified and it is not too late.

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 Plus special guests, TBA

 

Seven Pillars of Somatic Writing

 

1. Liberate your whole and centered voice. 

2. Heal embodied trauma and ancestral shame to embrace your brilliance as a writer. 

3. Reveal and write your deepest story.

4. Achieve creative completion by remembering your magic and untethering your power.

5. Embrace metaphor to elevate your personal storytelling to the level of the literary.

6. Decolonize your voice to align with your authentic authority.

7. Claim your Author’s Identity ™ to leverage your own story and step into visionary leadership.

 

Memoir Lab Community Classes

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• All Foundation Level classes, above, included with Memoir Lab membership for the duration of your program.

• Monthly, 2.5-hr Lab session with Tanya and Courtney

• Twice-monthly, 90-min small group workshop sessions with a Somatic Writing Coach

• Monthly story structure session with Cooper Lee Bombardier

• Monthly, 6-hr author retreat day with Tanya