Field Notes from the Open Embodiments Conference at UofA, Tucson on Tract. Trace.

Perfomring and/or speaking/being with Sex Worker Outreach Project artists,  advocates, and acrobats. On a bed,a stage, at a conference table. How Doing Nothing helped. And, of course, my disability/trauma/erotics/bodylogic peeps let me move it through.  Thanks to Tract.Trace for putting this on their website!

Natalie Brewster Nguyen and my Foxy Brown

loss, sexuality, movement, and trauma through the lens of performance art, dance, disability, ​poetry, and sex work.

Our panel in Tuscon, April 17--so excited!

Opening Trauma into Transformation: The Politics and Poetics of Embodied Knowledge in Physical Difference and Disability

This panel explores loss, sexuality, movement, and trauma through the lens of performance art, dance, disability, ​poetry, and sex work. As intertwined artists, the bright light we stand in is that of transformation through embodied inquiry. Elements of the panel invite audience participation/sensory immersion. 

Amber DiPietra:


“The Disabled Sex(ological Body) Worker: a Poetics of invisible, Intimate Performance”


Amber Dipietra, as a body and personality, has moved on an arc from socially-isolated child with a disability, to poet, to disability advocate, to escort, to intimacy coach. She recently moved from San Francisco to St. Petersburg, FL where she has started a a local chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project, swoptampabay,org.. Find her at adipietra.blogspot.com and thebodypeotik.com. 



Violet Juno:


"Portals to Transformation: Body, Art, Architecture and Sound"


Violet Juno is a transdisciplinary performance artist who has performed and exhibited at 70 venues in 36 cities since 1990. She combines text, sound, visual tableaus, kinetic sculpture, movement and a unique form of three-dimensional mapping to create multisensory experiences for her audience. Her work addresses issues involving disability/embodiment, trauma/transformation, and the poetic tension between language and languagelessness. More info at www.violet.juno.com



Margit Galanter:


"Vivid Spaces: Movement as a Re-source"


Margit Galanter is a movement educator, arts investigator, and dance poet living in Oakland, CA. Her fascination with the potency of movement -- the multiplicity of tones, its cultural efficacy, the composing -- has drawn her to embodied inquiry for decades. She has presented, performed, and taught her work throughout the US, and has a thriving practice in the Bay Area called Physical Intelligence Life Arts, where she finds the greatest understanding through the mysteries that emerge from the speculative nature of conversation, creative collaboration, and shared practice. PI Practice: www.physicalintellgence.org * Arts: www.margitg.wordpress.com


Denise Leto:


“Postcard Divinations, Embodied Loss, and the Poetics of Origin: A Grief Geography”

Denise Leto is a poet, editor, and explorer of multigenre and collaborative forms of media and performance. She wrote the libretto for the performance piece, Your Body is Not a Shark, which examined the poetics of embodied difference and disability through music, text, and dance. Recently, she was awarded a Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Sicily and was the recipient of the Orlando Poetry Prize. onecontinuousword@wordpress.com

vaquera outtakes: love and herpes

On our way out to pizza, I was able to say something cute and something funny about the new purse my mom had given me. A purse that looked like all the small, sleek, dark brown purses. And I was able to say it lightly, with a tone of forgiveness for all the ways mom and I were intertwined and how that lead to the decisions that got me and him here.

I could feel my tone be really winning, and it was genuine, though still very fresh, tenuous.  We laughed with nervous relief. The strain of a plucked wire. He plucked me off the porch, swung me around in a hug before he set me down on the driveway. I said, with wry caution, as we got in the car, "Don't get too excited Though I am the one who has the issues with excitement. This is clearly chemical. It may not last..." 

It had only been 10 days since I'd started anti-depressants. 

He was quiet, then said,

"Well, you know that joke about love and herpes..." then paused, considering. I was surprised since it was usually me that knew jokes and facts about anything sexually sketchy.

"What?"

"My biology teacher in high school--who was really socially awkward--used to say it."

In describing the teacher, he could have been talking about himself, but he never, or rarely, judged himself by making reference to any character traits in others.. Itself, a trait I found unfathomable and somewhat admirable.

"Yeah...?" I prompted, in what I hoped was a naturally rhythmic way. 

He spoke very slowly. It was this that left me feeling lonely in my racing head. Or gliding on the brink of shared discovery. Depending on the day.

"The difference between love and herpes is that herpes is forever," he finally supplied.

By now, we were driving, winding our way out of the suburban cul-de-sac. His joke and a drop in the stomach, though I was well aware of what I'd said just before it--in essence, Don't count

on this lasting, me persisting as this me...for you, for an us.

"So, I hope I have your herpes." He added, matter-of-fact.

"Oh, OK." Now, I was back, talking in a voice, which was one of my real, intimate, but light voices. "We'll, you definitely have that, because I have herpes."

We were on the highway now. Flashing by chain establishments. Walmart, CVS, Home Depot. I hated these buildings, monolithic processors of commodity...and I, left to my own devices, could mot reach any of them. Nor did I want what they had. What i wanted was a good escort community.  Then,  I hastened to add, in case he had forgotten,

"Just the cold sore kind--I've had since I was a little kid."

"Me too." He steered his aged Toyota in a gentle,  but adept way, between two raging SUVs.

"Mmm--hmm," a long-awaited, haughty confirmation in my voice. "That makes sense, that bump just beneath the inside of your lip I felt, which I was afraid was something worse." I remembered trying to tactfully ask him about it and him refusing to name it--which I later learned had nothing to do with danger or evasiveness or the existence of something untrustworthy. Though, in fact, his refusal to name was the big thing I would never trust--my tactic being to keep pointing to all my wild cards, out in the open.

"No," he said "You couldn't possibly remember a bump because you never kissed me with your tongue when we were first getting to know each other."

This was disturbing, but plausible. Some version of me had an excellent memory, but I did realize there was lots I didn't remember about the months before I met him and after. Also, it was sad to think (no matter what we would decide about our relationship in the coming months) that there was a time when I had held back from really kissing him.

"Well...at that time, I was getting my personal and professional wires crossed. If I didn't kiss you at first, it was because I was stalling to see if I needed to get paid or not."

He slapped my thigh as we pulled into the parking spec. "That's my girl!" 

This was the kind of tone we could hope to last if the medicine worked and, or, if I decided not to go back to the city.

We walked, hand-in-hand, across the strip mall parking lot, toward the pizzeria, which was painted a kind of neon sherbet color. It was not quite 5pm. I was not quite 40, but headed to the early bird special. He preferred it because of his acid reflux. Across many yards of glimmering blacktop,  the cab of a semi rested In the shade. 

"Oh la, " I sighed, "Remember when we met a year ago...and you were homeless and I was a prostitute?"

He squeezed my hand and said, softly, "That's my girl.”

outtakes from vaquera because the book about vaquera won't matter, as matter-in-action, unless the process lives in the "open* somewhere else. like here.

Progressively, I move off the page as I admit that reading--with one, low vision eye, is not an effective use of psychic, creative and processing energy. It certainly is not the kind of dance of phenomena the eye, the brain, the literary image in cadence can make, if less constrained, across a page.

Sometimes, I fear I am a lazy/nervous thought-circler. My partner sometimes claims I am a naysayer. Poet friend Sabrina claims the physical needs of a more limited body have taught me economy. Her answer is a balm, and a way forward. Though it is clear that through too much economy, I fail to make choices--intuitive, embodied moves, through the chaos that could be nothing or everything. A mass of content and energy.

I mean, in terms of editing--shaving away from a mass of collected earth and flesh--that could be a manuscript. A poem-book, or kind of story. Editing, choosing what to keep and not to keep, and how to cut the contour, so it can appear, as a durational form, here in the world, as book.

It is starting to matter so much less to me--writing, I mean--if it ever did. I just wanted to approach a subliminal singing and traveling.  Except writing is still a medium through which to enhance a witnessing/noticing practice around moving and connecting, physically. The editing feels pointless, a thing not mean to be contained as text. But then subsequently, I begin to disappear as a writer, as nothing gets edited, done, sent away, published. And that could be Ok, because my real work is that of a sex(ological body) worker/poet/performance artist. That is an imperfect sequence of descriptors to describe one situational body artist arcing through time, a word for which, I do not have a thing. Just me, is the thing.

Documentary poetics, then, and more direct memoir are a way to point at the body (sex (art (work. but it becomes a mass of sorting and sequencing, and trying to channel different tones and degree of fact into form so that something can be told if it cannot be witnessed or experienced somatically.  And again, I can't make it into some thing, not at least until more cultural shifts occur. Much of what i am making/documenting/discovering goes on over here, quietly and consistently as the body poetik--and outside the sessions with the clients, appears only occasionally at performance of those sessions to audiences. (Yay for last October in Boulder/Naropa and yay, trepidatiously, to the Soamtechnics conference in Tucson this spring!)

But I can make them apparent here too, it occurs to me, as a number of discrete outtakes from many undercover works and their corollary writings. Bhanu has taught me that the blog is almost better than the book. No, it is is. it is document, in the more alive, unfixed sense.

I used to be afraid that if I blogged, there would be nothing left to really write, since all the wiring is about an art of lived experience, a looking through a lens of sex and disability, of chronic pain and sex, of curvature and light and supple flow, of intimacy and it's bridge with poetry and the body in motion. And the very practical economy of who can come together, with who, in the most intimate way, and for what most personal efficacy and why. Sex and power and the juice that flows the world.

I think the only way to cut away now, to make any choice, to feel that I am making the motions of making the sex body art work that I do visible, is to actually blog. To blog as editing process. Because it is all process work. The writing is only an arm of the overall arc, the conversation my palm has with the spine.

So, right, yeah. I am trying to write a series of long poetic sections into a manuscript about sex work, deformity, bones, cowgirls, fear and safety in the sacrum. To help me edit it, to leverage choices around what to cut and how to sort and sequence, I'll alleviate some of the pressure from the body of notes, by a kind of restorative yoga. A lifting and pulling away in which the cut parts are put in traction, here, on the blog, as outtakes from the thing that will be  isolate in it's own, discrete body (as we all are and have to unlearn and learn in degrees), a finished manuscript, the vaquera manuscript.

And, I'll begin...now. Or tomorrow.

As for Open"

"Bodies are enfleshed, but not enclosed: they are open, radically so—biologically, environmentally, socially, politically, and affectively. To be open means having the capacity for connection and curiosity, and willing to be receptive to otherness and difference. Openness is an engagement with processes of becoming, to be in anticipation of future states without predetermined ends. To be in the open is to be exposed and vulnerable under conditions of necessity and possibility, of risk and danger. Open is ontological, an ethical stance, an imperative: it demands of us to open borders, detention centers, and prisons, to open our eyes and our hearts, our senses and our awareness. Invitations are openings, as this one is: Let us come together and open ourselves to the embodied experience of our messy entanglements, fraught alliances and fuzzy boundaries with each other and with the Earth. And let us do it in Tucson. Open Embodiments is an international conference marking the relocation of the Somatechnics Research Network to the University of Arizona’s new Center for Critical Studies of the Body. Founded in 2005 by Nikki Sullivan and colleagues in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, the Somatechnics Research Network is an international, transdisciplinary group of more than 500 researchers interested in the “always already” technologized nature of embodiment—that is, in the sense in which embodiments cannot be distinguished from the means and methods of their making, that they are contingent, emergent, actualized, and materialized relations between some parts of a milieu and others. Somatechnics conjoins an open-ended curiosity about embodiment in our contemporary techno-nature-culture contexts with an ethics of embodied difference derived from feminist, queer, transgender, disability, and critical race methodologies, and with a political commitment to dismantling and refiguring those social technologies that maldistribute the means of life and survival according to modes of embodiment, including anthropocentric hierarchies of value. Over four days, conference participants will have the opportunity to connect their scholarly, artistic, creative, and activist engagement with embodiment’s openness to the geophysical/geospatial location of Tucson, Arizona, in the U.S./Mexico borderlands: to the surreal beauty and hazards of the Sonoran Desert, to the many vital local cultures of resistance to the militarized violence of the border and to the state’s ugly and damaging race/gender/sexuality politics, as well as to the University of Arizona’s historic commitment to interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the physical and life sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. The conference will take place in numerous venues in Tucson’s revitalized historic downtown as well as the nearby University of Arizona campus. In addition to breakout sessions for delivering academic papers and keynote presentations from internationally renowned thinkers and culture-makers, Open Embodiments will include film screenings, performances, workshops, and other public events."

--from the Somatechnics conference site.


What opens us and spurs us on.

Gulfport notes have to start somewhere

This gyosy poet left LA and came to Gulfport. The Fox dog and I are in love.

Naropa outtakes, 3rd spiritual home next to my bed, the Gulf waters (love to you, Beth Murray) & San Francisco sex school

I met an ex-bio-engineer who knows how the bones build out to the cosmos. He eats spaghetti off the floor with his 11-year--old son, who writes his school essay on developments in prosthetic arms. My friend, the lady in the life of these boy-mens, is a sexologist I met in SF last sprieng. She came to scoop me up the night I arrived in Boulder.

Boulder back-lot altar, in honor of student and faculty transitions. Accomplishment or major life development is pure movement, which only exists in relation to little moments of breathing stillness. A tiny plastic dalmation, a teddy bear with pennies in his crotch, Denise's purple-scarlet boots on the flagstones. her "Sacrarium"and the pleasure of being a "voicer". Left some hot plum light in the vestibule for Bhanu. Met a woman my age, Danielle Parfunda, who has kids that have made up a thunder cat mythology. It comes from her mother bones. that is where the cats live, and in the cosmos too. Everything is her fault. She is the funky originator, the rot in the fruit. LOVE HATE on her knuckles,  tattoos. The brutalizing and brutalized force of being mother, of "foisting life". Talks with Sheila Blakc about letting her son decide whether he wanted three inches of orthopedic brutality for 3 inches of height, waiting, and the relief when he said, No.

Violtet Juno draws me being a comma and laying down over a student/former sex worker's spine to read a quote from an essay by Julie Carr on the body and the avant-garde.

These living things, these dead things. I am more alive and feeling around for others, so far outside my reach and inside of me, than I have ever been.

Mirasoles/girasoles, the nodding sleepy head of autumn death turning towards...

This pink rock just before the Naropa campus. To be that hard and open. Go to the body poetik site if you wish to hear more about this time from the perspective of a "professional" bodyworker seeking clients and co-researchers.

Not pictured here; the ESA's I met at Naropa. Leeny Sack who does performance art and her emotional support animal. The somatic psychotherapy student from Miami (my home state, what what!) and her ESA dog--a real squirreler. They made it so legitimate for me, as an artist and a person. Never travel without your dog again, they said. Especially, bring her to Naropa.

and here we are

hi loves and doves, i can't stop (in the name of Al Green) using my blogs like they are Facebooks and my Facebooks like they are blogs and wishing Twitter had telepathy and being embarrassed to use hash tags. girls who do boys who do girls like their boys who do boys like their girls.

but anyway, my blogs are now websites, in particular, the body poetik, formally, Write to Connect. much of me will be there, so if you miss me, go to there. if you ant to do poetry in the pool, sex in the meditation room, sensuality in the sickbed, the postmodern dance beyond disability, visit thee too.

theres another website to, for my underground erotic performance art research work, which is a nice way of saying...a lot of things. you can ask me about it, and by you, i mean, only you know who you are.]

i love you, gorgeous.

P.O.D. The Beautiful Pigeon Fancier, a film written by Gabo

I just found out that Gabriel Garcia Marquez died on April 17, 2014. In recent years, from time to time, I would do an anxious Google search, to see if he had passed, because I knew he was in ill health.
But I was not searching for that today. I was looking for an image of the cover of Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Remembering a connection between that book and the many ecstatic mornings in sex school when i spent meditating and sobbing about the viscera that binds sex and death. This would've been right around April 17, 2014. It was his last book, and it gave me a kind of wild and grounding permission.

 Cien Anos de Soledad game me permission also--when I read it my last year in high school. When I was ugly and alone and hid in the bleachers to read during lunch. When my 12th English teacher (who was into Joseph Campbell and archetypes) was so enamored of me reading that book that he allowed me to write poetry about it in lieu of taking all major exams. One Hundred Years of Solitude solidified everything I knew about intimacy, both familial and sexual, about time and its shape, and the fundamental basis of reality as the marvelous, often horrific, sensual.

And here is this woman, he met in in an airport once, who I only hope is telling a true story--though that never really matters. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/01/gabriel-garcia-marquezs-secret-muse-finally-reveals-herself-261175.html

sexological bodywork, finally, the paths converge

A fellow student from my CSB program wrote this up and let us all steal it, so here's what I am doing these days, if you are interested.

Need volunteers for sexological bodywork certification

I’m writing to see if you might be interested in receiving a sexological coaching/bodywork session with me. I am in training at the Institute of Advanced Human Sexuality Studies which will result in a certification (in the state of CA) in sexological bodywork.

Sexological Bodyworkers are educators and guides who tend to the whole human’s experience of their generative, creative energy, which most of us call our ‘sexuality’. Sexological bodyworkers believe sexuality is at the foundation of our authentic empowered human experience; the most radical foundational tool required to build cultures of soulfully reverent and spiritually responsible individuals. The sexological bodywork modality involves, among many other things, bodywork that does not exclude the genitals, sexuality education and self-pleasure coaching and witnessing. (borrowed fromhttp://www.therewilding.com/2013/03/sexological-bodywork-101/)

As part of my training, I need to practice coaching and bodywork with a variety of individuals. Sessions can be over email, phone, or internet (not in-person) or in-person. And the in-person sessions can vary a lot also from no touch and all clothes on to me witnessing you in your self-pleasure (no touch) to bodywork sessions with touch (including touching genitalia). Here are some of the types of practices I am working with:

—coaching (can be over the phone, email, or in person.) in orgasmic yoga practice, sex-related topics, shame, etc.

—coaching and witnessing mindful masturbation; being witnessed in your self- pleasure can be a powerful practice for getting in touch with more of you and having a “communal” sexually embodied experience

—coaching and witnessing you with your lover - also as a powerful practice of being witnessed and seen in your sexuality

—sexological bodywork (one-way touch from me to you in a safe environment with open communication): including genital massage and anal massage

Sessions could range in time from 15 minutes to an hour or more. Sessions can be over the phone, email or Skype or in person in my home in St. Petersburg FL  or in your home.

If you are interested in exploring this with me, both to support my training and learning process and to explore your own sexual interests, please let me know. I would love to work with you.

I teach embodied writing classes and soon, will be featuring an erotic poetry and bodywork class. Go to writetoconnect.com to learn more about me. In the future, I am especially interested in focusing on people with disabilities in terms of sexological bodyworker. I have worked as a disability advocate and social worker in San francisco.

Warmly,

Amber

New collaborative poem with Val Witte on Dusie

Thanks so much to Dusie and guest editor Carrie Hunter for publishing the collaborative poem I wrote with Val. Because I like poem-archeology, I will say that this poem was braided together by Val and I during a year in which shared some wretched travails with intern dating, etc. There are some lowly outcomes, not leas tot which is the pome itself,a kind of prayer and a process of bodywork (at least for me).


It is called "Instructions for Folds: Why Iris?"

3. From the bottom is wine, as buried, fruit festive arm warmers for Christmas choir

4. By turning the most unusual orientation what is peculiar typified or defied, repeat || step 7 and pressed || flat the way we see is sharp, shaped like a diamond or a heart with multiple points || beating

5. A finger inserted is opening what hides beneath color, a skin || to crave texture disfigured, what we want a persona projected, pulled to the middle and sewn
like a pocket despite a tendency to partner we operate

in threes 

Read the rest ot this poem and other great pieces at Dusie!

take the Amtrak

on a tropical day's pitch down into the polar vortex. Nearly avoid getting on the Jersey-bound or NYC-bound car by accident.

On the train, there is a long, lean young black man with a saxophone sticking out of his tote bag. He talks on his cell phone about credits and semesters. There is this beatnik kind of Asian chick, the likes of which i have not seen since San francisco. I want to snuggle her because her legs look cold. I want the man to hug me. Still, i am thrilled to be on a train alone, going somewhere.

The leaving-Ybor-City, downtown-Tampa industrial outskirts bayou. Is this the town called Palmetto where my new friend might live?

And then I've arrived with Mistress A. and things unfold as the kind of nee gift-economy of my life/

She drives me to meet the sacred sexologist in the swamp outside of Disney World. We talk, as low other coastals, about surviving California.

And at my spiritual/sexual fairy godmother's house, there is chai and there are poodles and this beautiful luminous feather blossom. She tells me what to expect upon returning to San Francisco to go to the sex Institute.

After, Mistress A and I contemplate the gift-economy of the intentional accident our lives might be becoming.

 It is all very Tom Robbins. Hilarious and sane. I don't really like the term "inner child", but if only I could have been Robbin's child bride.

Things have ceased to take a shape veer, but are swelling into beginning, rough edges and all. Doing the worm on Merle Haggard's face.

Florida swamp night is very black, but the scariest things aren't so scary anymore.

Christmas as the joyful collapse before it begins again

Holiday lights at LemonGrass Thai as Harleys do their charity parade, double wide hogs decked in lights and seasonal giving. Goddammit if I didn't miss the end-of-sumer fest featuring the cast of Sons of Anarchy.

A reiki practitioner invites me to his home, to welcome me to St. Pete, and gives me this cocoon. I can only think Jessica Tandy. I should have thought about the cat. Even though I put it on a high shelf, when it emerges, I am hung-over, exhausted from networking all night at the exotic dance club. passed out, a such when it flutters to the ground and the cat destroys its wings. I feel like a negligent murderer. Maybe foretold by this piece of gold glitter that got affixed to the chrysalis a couple weeks ago.

Artie Glove transfers the monarch, broken, to the sweet potato and basil pot on the balcony. I wonder if I should kill it, to be merciful. Two days late, it has climbed the herbal fronds and it is flexing its wings slowly, methodically, as if to rehabilitate. A kind of Christmas miracle.

Artie Glove plays the wolf man ingenue in flannels.

I make land and water turtle Christmas cards--a very glittery Flordacana flipflop kind of card. My answer to who I can only be this coming year, slo-mo-burlesque.

SWOP Tampa Bay hosts Dec. 17 event

SWOP Tampa Bay is hosting a vigil, a gathering, a chance to tell your story or hear other stories.

@ Genaro Coffee, 1074 Central Ave St. Petersburg

We will be offering free coffee, tea, and snacks.

If you are a sex worker, adult entertainer, stripper, escort, porn star, cam actor, or anything else, please come help us celebrate this day in healing and remembrance. We extend this invite to sex worker allies!

Our work is risky in a society that doesn't observe our basic human rights. Find out how you can join us on the 4th Monday of every month to build community, be empowered in your chosen profession. and create social change for sex workers. This group is facilitated by current or former sex workers.

Please RSVP so we can have enough free snacks!
727 280 6778
swoptampastpete@gmail.com

If you can't make it, but want to be a part of this local group, please contact us about joining the private Facebook group. We need you and can't wait to meet you!