Culture Club: Women of Words

What can happen when we gather around a table to inspire each other, share our stories and our buried histories, and release the unspoken truth of our lives to the world?

by JAMIE MEAD, Door County Women’s Writing Group

It’s early morning at Write On, Door County’s Writing Center in Juddville. The coffee pot is brewing; the tea water is hot; some snacks are laid out; and the writers have begun to arrive. One by one, women from all over the peninsula fill the seats around the long tables, settling in for another monthly gathering of the Door County Women’s Writing Group and ready to discuss the latest words they’ve penned and to bring fresh ideas into form.

Lauren Ward is our creative director and the lead facilitator for the group – a creation of Write On, Door County that’s supported by a grant from the Women’s Fund of Door County. Each month, she curates the scene, initiating our conversations by opening with inquiries to pique our interests and stir introspection, and offering a theme for the month: a particular writing type to focus on, or words from writers before us to inspire our own cathartic release of memory, emotion and stories we have yet to translate from our past. 

Throughout the past year, we’ve walked along the avenues of poetry, narrative, memoir and beyond. We’ve explored the written words of men and women alike, opening up the human experience piece by piece so that we could better find the words to describe our own version of things. 

All of the women in this group have come from different places, yet we all know this place as home and so already have something very deeply ingrained to connect us. As well, all are here to answer the call that is the need to write, to nourish our hungry souls with the delicacies of language, to seek a path of explanation and understanding of what has happened to us and how far we have come. We are mothers, daughters, wives, teachers, weavers, dreamers, observers of the world, all here together to remember. 

Our yearlong mentorship is nearly complete, having moved swiftly as time does, and with a sense that there was not enough of it to get all the words out, to say everything we needed to say, to share, to proclaim. 

This experience has been a healthy reminder to gather with those around you who also feel the call to create, to take the time to find each other and inspire the work we each must do. There is something incredibly satisfying about describing one’s experience, sharing it and seeing it immediately reflected in the eyes of those listening. Break past any fear you may hide behind that your words won’t be enough to transcend the separate lives we live. Put them out into the world to touch another heart and remind each other that we are all in this together. 

Join us, the Door County Women’s Writing Group, for Standing in Our Power on Sunday, Dec. 18, 4 pm, at Write On, Door County’s Writing Center, 4210 Juddville Road in Fish Creek, where group members will share their writing from their year together.

Special thanks to Write On, Door County for the beautiful space in which to gather and write together; to the Women’s Fund of Door County for creating scholarships so that this program could be free to local women writers; to Lauren Ward, and to Jerod Santek of Write On for designing and guiding a profound experience for all who participated.

Peninsula Arts and Humanities Alliance, which contributes Culture Club columns, is a coalition of nonprofit organizations whose purpose is to enhance, promote and advocate the arts, humanities and natural sciences in Door County.