Some people experience ourselves not only as individuals, but also as internal communities. We explore the worlds within us in many forms, and one of the most powerful is writing. Inner Community Writing Workshops are weekly online groups for people who use writing to explore our own internal multiplicity. We have three primary goals:

1. To support each other’s writing practice,
2. To develop our craft, and
3. To pursue healing and liberation in community.

The first two Inner Community Writing Workshops ever in November and December of 2023. A bunch of us participated for free as an experiment in building this kind of writing community, and we wrote beautiful work!

What we’ve learned learn will make the next round of Workshops even better.

What it’s like to be in a Workshop

Having a weekly group of writerly humans was so helpful to my own writing habit and building up that muscle from where it had been, lonely and yearning. — Andrea, writer and IFS practitioner

Writing from different parts of myself for the first time was a unique experience, but it’s quickly becoming a practice that I rely on. For me it’s an important bridge between my sense of self and my desire to craft authentic characters in my creative writing. — Anitet Wheeler

To have weekly structure in an emotionally safe space to tap into my creativity and explore my inner world more was such a fun way to build my confidence. To be witnessed and witness myself and my system was therapeutic in many ways. — Meg Ferge

The next Workshops will begin in spring 2024

Here’s what to know:

• When will we meet? Starting some time in spring 2024, weekly, for six weeks. We choose the time we meet based on what’s convenient for the participants.
• How will it work? During each meeting of the Workshop, I’ll provide a soft prompt (like these) for the week’s writing.
  • Three days before the weekly Workshop meeting, we all share our writing in a Google Drive folder.
  • We all read, interact with, and ponder each other’s work, then discuss it during our video call.
• For whom? Workshops are for folks who experience themselves as internally plural, have an existing writing practice, can commit to weekly meetings, and are curious about other systems.
• How many? Four to six participants in a Workshop.
• How much? A sliding scale, to be determined.
• Who’s this? Ash Chudgar (he/him or they/them), who’s organizing this group.

Read on for more details — or just click here to sign up to be notified about upcoming Workshops.

What you’ll get out of your Workshop

Inner Community Writing Workshops will interest you if you are looking for three things:

1. 🙌 Support for your writing practice. You’ll have a consistent weekly excuse to talk about writing in a supportive community. We’ll help each other cultivate and sustain a writing practice over time.
2. 🛠️ Developing your craft. By engaging deeply with other people’s work and having frequent opportunities to share your own, you’ll get to play around with new forms and techniques for exploring your internal world in writing.
3. ❤️‍🩹 Pursuing healing and liberation in community. Writing about your inner community can help wounded parts of you heal, facilitate accountability and reconciliation after internal harm, and help liberate your inner society from shame and other forms of oppression. As you use writing to pursue healing and liberation within your own system, you’ll also be helping the rest of us heal and get free as a community. And together, we might discover ways to pursue healing and liberation in all the communities we’re part of, at every scale.

Workshops are different from other writing communities in important ways:

• 🚫 Publication isn’t the goal. Some of us are quite likely to publish work we create for this group, and that will be wonderful! Others of us may never share what they write beyond our Workshop itself, which is also perfectly fine. Writing for publication, in any form, is not an expectation or a goal.
• 🚫 This isn’t a critique group. We will undoubtedly learn a lot about technique from each other — and simply writing a lot is likely to help us all write more and better. But in our Workshop, our shared goal isn’t to help each other become better writers, but to use writing better to explore our inner multiplicity, whatever form that exploration may take.

What Workshop participants have in common

We are probably going to be a wildly various group of people. But all of us will have these things in common with you:

• You experience yourself as internally plural, whatever that means to you. Many folks who fit this description identify as a plural system, a collection of ego states or alters, or otherwise internally multiple. Many others (like the organizer) got in touch with our inner multiplicity through the Internal Family Systems model. This group is for plural folks only.
• You can commit to your Workshop reliably. Of course life happens, nobody’s perfect, and we’ll give each other ample grace. But because our writing will put us in contact with each other’s delicate inner ecologies, we need to be able to count on each other to show up in community, week after week, with compassion for each other and our systems. This isn’t a group to dip in and out of casually.
• You are committed to your writing practice, whatever that means for you. You might be a published author, a faithful scribbler of "morning pages," a compulsive diarist, a famous blogger, a secret poet — the form of your commitment to writing is all your own, but your commitment to the practice of writing should be deep and abiding. This isn’t a good place to try writing for the first time.
• You are very curious about other systems. The real magic of your Workshop will happen as each of us gets to explore other systems than our own — not only each other’s internal communities, but also the external communities we participate in too, at every scale from the microbial to the municipal to the intergalactic. This isn’t a group for people who just want to focus inward. (If that’s what you need at this point in your healing, consider hiring an IFS coach like me.)

What to expect

Your Workshop is very simple in its structure, kind of like a brief, mellow, and very unusual college course.

• Weekly prompt. Every meeting, I’ll provide a soft prompt for us all to write about, which Workshop participants can interpret strictly or loosely.
• Sharing our writing. Three days before our meeting, you’ll share up to 1,000 words of your writing in a Google Drive folder. The rest of us will read, interact with, and ponder each other’s work.
• Weekly meeting. Then, during our weekly call, we’ll talk about each other’s writing in ways that sustain our practices, develop our craft, and pursue healing and liberation for every system.

Sign up to be notified about the next Workshops

If you’re interested, just fill out this form to let me know, and I’ll keep you posted about upcoming Workshops.