Herstory Writers Workshop

While the making of art is Herstory’s mission, increased self-awareness and healing are very often an important by-product, as stories relegated to silence take shape and begin to be heard. Practiced in a guided group setting, the Herstory method can bring about healing and understanding, even as it creates powerful art. “I’m tired of dying every day,” says one HERSTORY INSIDE writer of the appeal of the Herstory method to her. “I don’t cry as much now,” says a Latina member of her experience in a Herstory community-based workshop.

Herstory’s healing effects extend to communities as well as to individuals. Herstory’s bilingual workshop at the Patchogue-Medford Public Library was established in response to the Lucero hate crime in an attempt to bring together Spanish-speaking and English-speaking women in a spirit of hope and healing.

As the presence of Herstory within the prison system has grown, more women are coming to our workshops with the expressed desire to use the writing process to look at the issues that have led to their incarceration – those deeply entrenched, often generational cycles of violence, sexual abuse and other family traumas that have darkened the lives of so many of our HERSTORY INSIDE members, often driving them to drug and substance abuse as a means of burying the pain of their childhoods. Prison officials tell us that Herstory participants have developed greater discipline in abiding by prison rules and that prison employees demonstrate greater respect for Herstory members. ‘The most effective program ever attempted in Riverhead,” says Captain Helen Jeslak of Riverhead Correctional facility about Herstory.