After a hiatus,  I'm returning to facilitating workshops. 

This new one starts May 29, 2019

Faraway is Close: a workshop in metaphor, memoir, fiction
facilitated by Shebana Coelho

Inspired by stories and sounds of different cultures - faraway & close - and in a safe nurturing environment, we will imagine, read, dance, speak and create short embodied prose/lyric pieces to awaken the story indigenous to you, the one only you can tell.
Through listening to and creating from stories with diverse perspectives, my hope is to connect into what may seem 'other,' dissolve borders and step into our shared belonging to land, story and spirit. In this incarnation of Faraway is Close, we will create from the encounter with literature and songs of India and the Middle East such as Urdu ghazals, classic Bollywood films, and Arabic poetry.

WHEN: Four Wednesdays starting May 29, 6pm-8:30pm
WHERE: Private home, Santa Fe, North side

FEE:  $150
$140 early bird (by May 19),

To participate "virtually" via audio recordings/email, the fee is  $100 (every Wednesday, audio files with readings and exercises sent to you; you complete them at home and email to me, and at the end of the four sessions, I'll share some feedback)

REGISTER HERE

INFO
shebanacoelho.com
email writeoutloud13@gmail.com
cell 609 651 5840

For over 2 years now,  ideas for these creativity workshops have been emerging and wonderful writers have been showing up to them.  The title of this blog is part of a workshop title: Write Out Loud: Speak Your Silence. That title  came to me while talking to a dear friend and filmmaker, Meghan Horvath some years ago. We were discussing how we are often asked to describe who we are, what our projects are, what our goals are, what makes us artists and we are asked to do this fatatfat as my mother says in Hindi, fast, succinct, right on the spot, on the dotted line, while someone is pouring us wine, and expecting the answer before the glass is full.  Both Meghan and I talked about how it's the work we'd rather let speak, not us. And I said, I really think we have to speak our silences as loud as those words.  That phrase stuck and I knew that it meant more than I could really explain. Which is why I knew I could trust it.  So it became a workshop and really the umbrella name for all the workshops I do - how do you speak your silence? how do you tell the story only you can tell?

I love bringing to these workshops all the different journeys that have brought me here and I love the deep play of them and mixing genres, mixing lives, mixing stories, memories and fictions, listening for what resonates and most of all, I love the encounter with others, seeking to give voice and spirit to what is always lying in wait.  After having some especially beautiful workshop experiences these past few months, I felt inspired to feature some of the work that emerged from them. And so - this blog to do just that. 

To receive updates as new material is posted to the blog and news about workshops, please SUBSCRIBE (on the right) or email me at writeoutloud13@gmail.com.  You can also follow us on Facebook    

Onwards, andale, into writing out loud.
--Shebana en Santa Fe 

September 2015:  reWrite the Past  reVision the Present 
a creativity workshop that invokes our oral traditions to create
prose/spoken word pieces. Details at www.shebanacoelho,com

A beautiful workshop that began in what felt like summer and ended at the start of winter on a blue moon night, writing in an adobe room, with a piñon fire and shadows on walls and us mixing memories, weaving stories together, speaking them out to each other, so that where I end and where you begin is different than either of us ever imagined. 

Writing by:
​Diane Chase
Belinda Edwards
Judy Herzl
Karen Kerschen
Irina Sels
Veena Vasista
Hannah Wiseheart 

I distanced myself from her when we met my cousins, allowing myself to enjoy the thrill of seeing them after so many years. But I knew she was holding her breath, scared or fearful of what would come up. 

It had been fifty years since she’d seen them too. Now we were the adults enjoying the pleasure of each other’s company and she was elderly, the reason for our meeting but peripheral to the intimacies that could now grow.

Back then, my cousins and I were children, and she and their parents were the adults who knew secrets. I was unaware of those taking place in their house, just as ours were unbeknownst to them.

Debra and Lisa seated themselves on either side of my mother. As she relaxed I felt myself let go the responsibility for her well-being in that moment. We all might get to know one another anew.

Ronnie’s son Adam sat down beside me. In his muscle shirt, his arm-length tattoo drew my attention. I asked to see it.
​
“Are you into mythology?” he asked. “This is Atlas shouldering the world.” 

His voice was tentative, in the way I know he’d been trained as a police detective, to establish rapport, yet holding back. It relaxed me into enthusiasm.

No need to hook him with the darkness of generational secrets. I knew he had his own tales to tell, but they derived from 9/11, not from the immigrant children’s experience of his parents.

I’m pleased to launch this blog with excerpts of work that emerged out of workshops this year. Re-reading them, I feel the alchemy of kinship - sitting together writing reading sharing – deep play – the subconscious manifest – the places that words take us when we’re not looking and even when we are – and the stories that know how they want to be told – all we need to do is listen…
Writing by:
Lisa Bertsch
Belinda Edwards
Ellen Fox
Dawn Hamilton
Amy Kaplan
María Cristina López
Cati Perez Lacey  

PROLOGUE

It is November. The dirt road leading into the village is slick and icy from the snow, which will turn into mud once the snow melts, making this road almost impossible to travel by car. At the bottom of this dirt road, the century-old cottonwoods encircle the plaza, bringing shade in the summer and pageantry during the fall. Today, they stand bare branched like witches hair standing toward the vast gray sky while a convent of ravens sit, black specks on brown bark against grey sky, calling us from tiny windowless adobe houses into the plaza where dirty snow sticks to our boot as we trudge forward. We wait for Esperanza.

THE MAILMAN

For ten years, I delivered mail in the small communities of northern New Mexico through winter blizzards, summer monsoons, and golden cottonwood Indian summers. I drove my little rickety mail truck from town to town, delivering mail every day, rain or shine. I remember the small town of Truchas. It smelled like earth, not the sanitized earth of California or the rich manure fields of Texas but the stringent smell of pine needles decomposing into dark earth and piñon wood burning in little brown fireplaces in little brown adobes in this little brown town.

This is where I met her - Esperanza.

At ten years old, she was taller than most with thin, wild black hair that everyone tried to tame - first by brushing  to the kinky roots out to the straight ends. After her mother bore three more children, one after another, the brushing stopped and gave way to braids that would tangle like the giant roots of the cottonwoods, flat in some spots, puffy and rising from her head in others, giving the impression that this child rose from the tangled and stringent earth roots of Truchas. Her hair finally turned toward her African roots, a strange and wondrous sight, like a wild orchid nourished in a contrary climate.

This exotic flower moved me. I began watching her, looking for excuses to be with her. Church, where we all congregated on Sundays, was the ideal place. I would sit in the back, while her family sat in front of me. I waited and watched her like a hungry coyote, waiting for a scrap of food. She loved church not for the message about “God” but for the singing. She would fling herself at the songs like a drowning swimmer flaying around the melody, and sinking into the harmony.

LINEAGE

I.

Bridgette Carney
Ella McGann
Dorothy Lacey
Hugo deLacey
Snow Hill Laceys
Henry Orlando Lacey
Dorothy Lacey
Papa Cachi y
            Mama Chata
Victor Perez
Mercedes Villanueva Victor Perez

II.

The mist arising from
            de bogs
cool air up me nostrils
der Faerie Spirit dat
            a cum wid me
            acrost der moor
to der shimmerin’ sea
            ‘n smell o’ fish
            ‘n boats ‘n brine

The silken skin of the
            precious princess
enveloped in colored feathers
languid eyes that
suddenly flash
that sparkle of desire

His tall body atop a horse
            asking her the way
            caught off-balance by
            her curious stare
no longer wanting to know
            the road ahead


She Could Not Find a Way  

She could not find a way to mend it.

It was always there -
aching
furious
- images of tearing a sheet to shreds.

There were no sheets beneath them,
just the prickling straw
that stuck to the sweat of their bodies.
With furious kisses and gripping hands
they clasped their lust between them.
And when it was done,
and he was gone,
she lifted the hay with the pitchfork
and fed the cows who bayed.

She did not know where tenderness lay.

Her coldness enveloped her like ice
and shattered his approach to her.
But, no matter, the Lord has his ways,
and she as a sinner could only obey.