Written Women: Sei Shōnagon

Written Women is a monthly writers salon at Cordelia, inviting you to respond to poems, stories and myths written by and about women.

Each month, we'll read and discuss a different text to inspire our own free-write session, drawing from women's stories of power, madness, sensuality, tragedy, queerness, and insubordination. Time will be set aside at the end of each meetup for folks to share excerpts of what they've written.

This May, we’ll read excerpts of Sei Shōnagon's "Pillow Book," a diaristic series of writings, poems, lists, character sketches, and personal anecdotes which offer a vivid image of life as a lady of the court during the Heian period in medieval Japan.

We'll consider not only the poetic qualities of the writing itself, but also its narrative power, and the cultural contexts in which it was written, distributed, and preserved. Negotiating the boundary between womens' public and private lives, we'll explore how the public's consumption of womens' interiority has both changed and stayed the same across time and space, and write our own pieces which sit at the threshold between "written for me" and "written for the world."

Written Women is led by poet, movement artist and facilitator Katya Borkov. You can learn more about her work at www.everythingspills.studio, or on instagram @everything.spills

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.