dear storyteller,
THE ANCESTORS WRITERS ROOM presents a 2-month professional development workshop series for otherworldly storytellers who work with Spirit, Ceremony and Ancestral Wisdom Traditions.
This series is for the storyteller as griever. We invite artists who identify that grief and loss have significantly shaped your art, practise and life overall.
We work with an expansive and re-membered definition of “writer” and “storyteller.”
bring the TV series, the big queer musical, the multi-book saga, the epic dance videos, the sacred clothing line, the pop-up food justice exhibit, the land + star mapping concert tour, the cinematic masterpiece, the keynote speech music album, the neighborhood poetry series, or the trans, abolitionist, disabled witch’s version of love is blind.
Bring the devoted medicine work, community service, healing practise or oracle research that comes part and parcel with the work. Bring your projects, practise and alivelihood in any phase of development, in any season of life.
In THE ANCESTORS WRITERS ROOM we do not work for capitalist and colonial industries, we are building a movement and economy of artists who work for the planet.
thus, a core part of our series offers dedicated study, research and design on earthen-economies and village wealth building, to serve y/our work, livelihood, planetary commitments and ancestral promises, including:
sovereign village funding models, abolitionist cities, circular markets, thriving village prototypes, landback + rematriation promises, regenerative ecosystems…all that feed into the global emergence of a grief-centered, spirit-full, planet-focused way of life.
Saturday afternoons,
1-4pm eastern time
at wildseed centre for arts & activism
october 10 – december 12
with your host & guide,
shaunga tagore
Shaunga (she, her, they, we) is a queer, multi-gendered Bengali practitioner and teacher of Ancestor Theatre, and founder of Otherworldly Giants Storytelling School. She is a death walker, grief doula, multiverse historian and certified storytelling nerd. Shaunga is a long-time writer, performance artist, astrologer & celestial wisdom keeper initiated in reclaimed folk magic traditions from her lineage. Her most dearly held magic is an animal medicine & animal whispering practise focused on supporting animal elders and their humans through end-of-life, transition and after-life. To learn more about Shaunga visit her bio.
We meet every Saturday at Wildseed Centre: 24 Cecil Street Toronto, ON M5T 1N2
We run the workshop from 1-4pm, with time for a spacious exit, mingling, co-working, or journalling and integration between 4-5pm.
This series is spiritually rigorous, creatively enlivening, as well as gentle and accommodating for the physical body.
This is a playful, grief-honouring space, where compassionate, holistic and mature perspectives are offered to serious topics, including: trauma, survivorship, death/dying, addiction, genocide, abuse, intimacy/sex, community conflict and major personal/planetary concerns & commitments.
To enjoy our time together, we recommend you have emotional support systems/practices in place and experience with meditation or spiritual healing.
This series is open to Black, Indigenous, people of colour and non-white mixed race folks. This current cycle is not open to white folks.
*Wildseed is wheelchair accessible. Let us know of any accessibility needs in your registration form. Spots are limited.
over the course
of 2-months,
we travel a planetary altar
through the 5 primordial
directions and elements.
each session is divided in three parts:
warm-up (opening)
workshop
multiverse mapping (closing)
in each session we visit & explore
a different part of our altar:
center, the heart
study:
the storyteller
as altar keeper
Our workshops revolve around the unique study of storytelling as altar keeping, as well as fundamental technologies and techniques of ancestor theatre.
In ancestor theatre, we carry stories as altars, where many things come to die and many things come to live.
Our stories are sacred sites where ancestors come to move, heal and evolve. Our stories are places of communion with beyond-human relatives, descendants, and unseen worlds. The storyteller puts their heart on the line, inviting the toughest parts of humanity and society to die well, transform and become the thriving, healing and liberation our generations, forward and backward, have prayed for.
To deepen understanding of our craft in this field of work, Shaunga guides us through her practise, Open Heart Surgery Storytelling. This is a joyful, rigorous and downright nerdy study of the inner workings of our original scripts, artwork, as well as beloved stories from popular TV, film and books.
south, earth
practise:
the breath that stopped
a genocide
We begin each session with a warm-up for spiritual athletes, dedicated to the grieving mothers of the world – including those who exist within us, and the earth itself as grieving mother.
We travel 7 different kinds of breaths that represent:
• 7 phases of ancestor-guided storytelling
• 7 generations forward and backward
• 7 layers outward – to live wholeheartedly
…and 7 layers inward, inside of time, inside of the day, into deep resonance with the heartbeat of the earth.
Here, we land in the timeline where we shut down all systems of supremacy, and where our best stories are unfolding, in tandem with a global thriving village, determined to re-member itself.
We infuse gentle movement and vocal exercises to support the personal and planetary nervous system, free the voice, and warm you up, in the body and soul.
north, air
keeping time:
stargazing
Our warm-up ends with Shaunga’s stargazing technique, called the quantum birth chart and animal universe. This practise comes from a 15-year practise with astrology, spiritual decolonization, and medicine/lineage reclamation.
Here, Shaunga shares how she reads the ‘unseen’ elements of the sky, quantum matter, spiritual data, cosmic weather, and primordial animal guardians that appear alongside celestial bodies.
Our earth + air warm-up doubles as a land-and-star based offering to our host and visionary Black-led space, Wildseed. We prioritize listening to the land, to ensure our wealth feeds back into the thriving of both human and non-human stewards of our host location.
Including the sky in our warm-up ensures that we always know what time it is on earth’s clock, and that we include the movements of nature and the cosmos in collaboration with our creative process.
This is an opportunity for you to practise listening and communicating with the land and stars, as well as allow your unique perspective of the sky and earth shape and move the direction of your work.
west, water
holistic development:
planet whispering
peer support
During our ‘workshop’ portion, you receive full-bodied personalized support for your works-in-progress, your spiritual gifts as a creator, and your alivelihood goals.
Shaunga takes the group through a series of her specialty Planet Whispering services designed for holistic development support, including:
• numerology, astrology, or tarot for you/your project
• animal whispering, body whispering or divinatory dramaturgy
• your unique money magic and business opportunities
• decoding ancestor meaning and guidance from your dream world
• support with lineage-specific altar practices
• exploration of spiritual gifts, metaphysics & relationship with the after-life
east, fire
research & design:
wealth building
for abolitionist economies
We end each session with mapping, research, and design of abolitionist village wealth building.
While many writing, creative and “professional development” spaces are geared toward helping you survive, thrive, or “make-it” in mainstream artistic industries, this space is about calling back our wealth from every place it was stolen, lost or forgotten.
How does your work bring forth, not just alternatives, but the antidote to capitalist and colonial industries?
As we travel through this series, what surprising and exciting designs naturally emerge? Where do we find we are becoming each other’s alternate timelines, spin-off series, or b-side albums? Where are we dropping easter eggs in each other’s stories and visions?
What kinds of inventive and surprising thriving village designs can we now start to imagine and map out, by looking at our work alongside one another?
How does this magic feed our ideas for collaborative economic systems, circular markets, abolitionist villages, and grief-centered ecosystems?
On our last session, we look back on our epic multiverse mapping. What did we learn about how our projects, medicines, research, dreams and ancestral promises are weaving with one another? What does this make possible moving forward?
reciprocity
To join THE ANCESTORS WRITERS ROOM: $350 for the full series
You can pay cash up front, or e-transfer to shaunga.tagore@gmail.com
Or, you can pay by credit card / paypal by dropping the honey in Shaunga’s thriving village pot.
ADD-ON: We’re offering a special offer of $500 if you want to add-on a private 60-90 minute session with Shaunga on any of her specialty services. You have a year to book your session. This is usually $250 USD, so get in on the deal!
Note: for those outside of Tkaronto who are very interested in attending this series, we may be able to offer an option for long-distance ed. Please register and let us know you’re interested in the long-distance option. Do not send payment until we confirm we can offer you a spot.
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