Virtual Hours:

Corporeal Writing co-founder Domi Shoemaker began hosting Virtual Hours at the onset of lockdown during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. What began as a temporary attempt to salve the loneliness of no longer gathering in person has blossomed into a multitude of rich writing communities. Domi started out hosting hours once per week, then twice…until now, when we offer community writing hours five days a week, Monday through Friday.

Hours typically unfold in the following way: a little bit of catching up, followed by a writing portal provided by the group facilitator. Writers then take an hour (with cameras on or off, up to you) to write from the portal. Afterwards, there’s an opportunity for brief sharing. Hours are now hosted by Domi Shoemaker, Carol Fischbach, Yashasvani Vacchani, and M.D. Leto.

You can read all facilitator bios further down this page. These are safe spaces. Come write with us.

The Zoom links in the righthand column are recurring, so feel free to bookmark them for convenient access.

If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to reach Domi Shoemaker at domi@corporealwriting.com

Free Community Offerings:

Corporeal Writing occasionally offers free community workshops over Zoom, which are recorded and which you can check out anytime. If you’ve never worked with us before, they might give you a better sense of what to expect. And if you have worked with us, here’s some more goodness for you! Click the title of each offering to access the recordings.

The Abyss Both Playful and Devouring with Lidia Yuknavitch: Lidia shares six small stories that help us keep making art in the face of fuck. For writers, artists, art activists, and humans who feel shaken by the edges of things lately. Why we should keep doing what we are doing, how we can keep doing what we are doing, and how we have to take turns together.

Excavate! Bypass Your Thinker Brain and Write with Domi Shoemaker: Domi will guide you further into your singular storytelling and creative power. The Corporeal Writing techniques Domi will introduce are designed to help you discover you own strengths by bypassing your thinker brain. Come with a new idea, a current piece in process, or those scribbles at the back of your writing pad that are begging to be set free. You will be able to apply what you learn to any of the writing projects you have that need some love. Come on and write!

Automatic Writing with Leigh Hopkins: Leigh’s one-hour workshop is an invitation to surrender your conscious mind and enter new portals in your creative practice. Meditation. Channeling. Trance. Throughout history, automatic writing—also called psychography or Spirit Writing—has been practiced by writers, artists, and musicians as a way to release blocks, receive messages, and discover new channels in their work. In an age when our lives are spent staring at screens, automatic writing brings artmaking back to the body and invites the language of the cosmos, the surreal, the soul.

Hibernation with Janice Lee, Katie Guinn, and Daniel Isaiah Elder: 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 Daniel Isaiah Elder for a calm, generative session of writing and ritual.

Brainstarring: Meteors and Memory with Domi Shoemaker, Katie Guinn, and Lidia Yuknavitch: Meteor showers are celestial events that emerge from a radiant point in the sky. Among our favorites: The Lyrids, Aquarrids, Perseids, Orionids, Leonids and Geminids. (By the way: you can find a schedule of upcoming meteor showers here.). These space showers happen when the Earth passes through interplanetary debris, like comet particles. Which reminds us how it feels to enter memory, as if we go back into a kind of giant cosmic debris field filled with pieces, traces, retinal flashes, feelings, dream bits from our experiences. Come play with Corporeal Writing in the realm of Meteors and Memory, where we will put our ideas into orbit and into dialogue, traversing cosmic writing portals together.