Writing from your abundance:: Writers resisting survival mode

a workshop! plus some musings

Jun 08, 2024

Welcome to the Life Is In Love With Me newsletter if you’re new. If you’re a regular recipient of these reminders of love, welcome back! 🌹🥭🌹🥭🌹🥭

I hope you are so well loves. I want to share some updates, offerings, and some musings. Musings first.

The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred, until the sacred in them remembers
-Sarah Durham Wilson

This quote has been on my mind a lot. I think of the many ways that we are currently resisting soullessness. The many ways we are to interrogate any soullessness that sits unchecked within us. I see how treating everything that I interact with as though I can reawaken the sacred works within a cycle of liberation. Worthiness sits on our tongues, is birthed in our hearts. If we believe it, it is so. It is such a small and dangerous act. To set alight a person’s expectations by reminding them that they are safe to see themselves as worthy of sacred treatment. It feels like extended eye contact; there is nowhere to go, nothing to flinch from, you are here, being seen as so worthy of this treatment. I want you to have this, this warmth, this grace, this compassion, this listening ear, this unbound soul, this willingness to speak with you in case nobody else has today. We keep going until it looses the old ways of being from all of us.

Next week’s essay will be an open letter to someone special. It is born from these musings. I can’t wait to share it with you.

Come write with me!

I’ve returned to my workshop-facilitating days to offer writers and friends space to reflect on and resist survival mode. This workshop is titled: Writing from your abundance:: Writers resisting survival mode. Restoring self-belief is deeply important to me and it has allowed me to better advocate for myself and writing in endless ways. I’m so excited to explore this topic deeper with you.

Virtual writing workshop. Sunday 30th June, 2024. (1pm ET - 2.30PM).

Here is what to expect::

How have survivalist tendencies disconnected you from your voice? Imagine what it would mean to resist or to leave the spaces that force you into survival mode. Think of what you would write if you felt free enough. In this virtual safe space, held and hosted by Amara Amaryah, you will be in the company of writers who want to return to their original fullness and excitement for their craft.

Intentions for the session::

~ creating a creative safety net for imagination

~ making space for new realities through your own words, lovingly releasing what no longer is true for who you now are.

~ challenging/considering survivalist habits while in community and on page

~ reading from resources of others who dared

~ affirming other writers

~ allowing self-inquiry

~ inspiration and a reminder of the vastness that exists within you

I hope you’ll leave this workshop with::

~ a stronger and restored sense of abundance

~ awareness about the ways survival mode may interact with your writing

~ time to observe yourself writing in new ways

~ journal prompts to write from

~ a reading list

~ community

About the host::

I have dedicated years to working through my own relationship to abundance and survival. Many of the activities and prompts that I will share in this session come directly from my own experience. Creating a life and writing practice that is conscious of how to resist scarcity is something I wish for us all. Here is my bio, writing achievements, accolades, and experience:

Amara Amaryah is a poet, travel and wellness writer, author, and nomad. She writes the Life Is In Love With Me newsletter, a landing place for travel memories and love stories. After graduating from the University of Birmingham with a first-class English Literature degree as the recipient of the Tess Winnall prize (awarded for the highest dissertation on the course on Maya Angelou’s autobiographical series), Amara discovered her literary love rested in Caribbean poetry and Black women’s autobiographical fiction. As a young professional, Amara ventured into the world of digital marketing, only to quickly understand that her gifts were not well placed in an office environment nor the hyper-online nature of life as a Digital Marketing Manager. She packed up her apartment, pivoted her career, and left the UK to travel the world, teaching English and travel writing for various publications. Amara’s travel and wellness writing has been published in Time Out, Condé Nast Traveler, ESSENCE, AMAKA studio, The Good Trade, SELF, Well+Good, Travel Noire, Black Ballad, and more. She has made homes in car-less islands on the Caribbean coast of Central America and small mountain towns in Mexico. Solo travelling introduced Amara to the possibility of shaking limiting beliefs and choosing life. She loves this the most and is committed to writing about it while travelling slowly in her favourite places in the world.

Her debut poetry pamphlet ‘The Opposite of an Exodus’ was published by Bad Betty Press in 2021. Amara’s poems have since been published in The Caribbean Writer, Lolwe, Wasafiri, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Under the Radar Magazine, PREE Lit Mag, and translated into Spanish in the Colombian publication Arcadia. In 2019 the poet was invited to perform a collection of poems at the Cosmopoética literary festival in Córdoba, Spain. Recently Amara was invited to read poems virtually at the USVI Literary Festival & Book Fair 2023 as part of the Writer’s Bachanal. She has also read on various stages in the UK including Birmingham’s Hippodrome as a part of the Hippodrome Young Poets collective and The Royal Shakespeare Company. Prior to her poetry, Amara was selected as a writer for the TYPT:16 sold-out production HATCH, by Talawa Theatre Company, the leading Black British theatre company in the UK. A few workshops that she has most enjoyed teaching include an experimental poetic form session with Trust + Travel and a virtual poetry and storytelling session with The Mix UK.

Most recently, her poetry has been published in the International Poetry journal Wasafiri. In the journal’s 117th edition, you can find Amara’s poems ‘Salt’ and ‘Vows’. An exclusive poem was also released online. You can read ‘BASTIMENTOS’ here.

A taster

Here are some writing prompts on abundance and scarcity to get you thinking (and feeling and knowing) before the workshop:

Which narratives are you telling yourself about yourself that are no longer true?
When do you feel most full? Is there any way for fullness to exist regularly? Daily? Expand on why, or why not.
What would you write with your last thousand words? Who would you write to?

Photo credit: Fatima Halidou. Morocco 2018, a trip to observe myself being, disempowering limitations

It would be a dream to see you there. I am offering this workshop at $10.10 to keep it reasonably priced. There will be a limited number of spots available. I have space for a few sponsored attendees too, in case you would like to join but feel unable to commit to a ticket right now. With that said, please reach out if you’d like to attend but do not feel able to finance it. This workshop is about resisting scarcity and survival, know that space will be created for you in the places that you are meant to be.

Please spread the news with your community and writer friends. This will help me reach all who feel connected to this workshop.

I want to thank my latest paid subscriber

Aris Hearth

who writes A Perspective of Leaves. I’m so grateful for the paid support but also for the continued affirmation that you send my way. Your support is received with love and gratitude! For a while, I’ve reduced annual paid subscriptions to $48.88 (from $88). I am preparing to show up with my paid readers in a new way and in the meantime I’d love to grow and increase the paid support for this space. Paid readers receive 111 daily affirmations and a travel backstory upon subscription.

Thank you, so much, for being here. Below I share some more writings that I hope you will enjoy.

An Origin Story: Food Poisoning In Mexico Turned Me Nomadic

Pisces season and the overstimulated artist, a remedy

The infantilization of kind people

A story about quitting my job to write

Musings on Black nomadism (pt 1)

The Friday unwind 004: When there is nothing to become

Love,

Amara Amaryah