Hibernation: Rituals and Portals for Creative Mammals

a free Zoom event with Corporeal Writing’s Janice Lee, Katie Guinn, and Domi Shoemaker
Saturday Dec 7th 1:00-2:30pm Pacific
(a recording will be made available afterwards to all registrants)

"Hibernation is so complex it requires adaptations at multiple levels." — Elena Gracheva, neurophysiologist at Yale University

Come winter, we receive competing signals. Outside our bodies, Western culture revs its engines, spinning itself up to an RPM entirely discordant with the quieting natural world beyond our cities and towns. That quiet lives inside of us, too—the deeper signal of winter, the invitation to experience quiet and even silence within ourselves. Our bodies are tuning forks and it's difficult to resist the cacophony of holidays and consumerism and travel, but if we make an effort, we can prepare the cave inside ourselves—and, importantly, our creative practice—to sound the tones that invite a long, nourishing winter hibernation.

Join Corporeal Writing's Janice Lee, Katie Guinn, and Domi Shoemaker for a calm, generative afternoon of writing and ritual. We will drink tea and burrow into writing portals and make a cozy space within each of ourselves to support our writing in the long dark months to come.

Janice Lee (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction, & poetry, most recently Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). She is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing, a practitioner of Engaged Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh), and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

Katie Collins-Guinn (she/they) is an artist, mother, designer, illustrator and writer, spouse, flower gardener, North Portlander and dirt digger. Her adult coloring book The Stoner Babes was published in 2018 with Microcosm Publishing, which celebrates diversity alongside the transcendental and medicinal qualities of cannabis. She’s spent time as a contributing freelance writer for the Portland Mercury and has been published in Pacific Stone Zine, Call Me [Brackets], Entropy, Nailed Magazine and others. She holds an undergrad degree of Fine Arts in Apparel Design. Katie oversees design elements, merchandise and other creative and logistical happenings at Corporeal Writing, and leads the young mammals collaborations. She co-parents 21 roses and counting.

Domi Shoemaker (they/them): While finishing an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in 2015, Domi was asked by Lidia Yuknavitch to help create Corporeal Writing. 9 years later, Domi manages Corporeal Writing’s Virtual (drop-in) Hours, edits and coaches writers 1:1, and generally does whatever they can to recognize, elevate, and connect writers, artists, hooligans and agitators who might not otherwise have found a way to get their work out into the world or meet one another.