dear storyteller,
We invite you to join THE ANCESTORS WRITERS ROOM for a 10-week workshop series for multidimensional storytellers who work with Spirit, Ceremony and Ancestral Wisdom Traditions.
We invite storytellers who want a space for dedicated study of your craft, as well as holistic, personalized developmental support for your projects, spiritual gifts, leadership, and wealth building goals.
We invite 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 and oracle research that comes part and parcel with the work.
Bring your dream in any phase of development – whether it’s a seed in your belly, an ancestral whisper tapping your shoulder, if you’re deep in the weeds (aka mad spiritual scientist mode), or if you need support while crossing a finish line. Come as you are. Bring whatever is clear and in focus, and bring the beautiful mess. If you don’t know how to choose one thing, bring it all.
In THE ANCESTORS WRITERS ROOM we do not work for capitalist and colonial industries, we are building a movement of artists who work for the planet.
thus, a core part of our series offers dedicated study, research and design on how your work weaves, contributes and feeds:
sovereign village funding models, abolitionist village ecosystems, and the emergence of grief-centered, planet-focused economies.
Saturday afternoons,
1-4pm eastern time
at wildseed centre for arts & activism
october 3 – december 12
with your host & guide,
shaunga tagore
Shaunga is a queer, multi-gendered Bengali practitioner and teacher of Ancestor Theatre, death doula, grief worker, multiverse historian and certified storytelling nerd.
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, intimate/community conflict and major personal and planetary concerns.
To enjoy our time together, we recommend you have emotional support systems/practices in place and experience with meditation or spiritual healing.
*Wildseed is wheelchair accessible.
over the course of 10 classes,
we travel a planetary altar
through the 5 primordial
directions and elements.
center, the heart
study:
the storyteller
as altar keeper
We study the unique art 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.
Throughout the series, Shaunga guides us through her foundational practise called Open Heart Surgery Storytelling. This helps us build deeper understanding of ancestor theatre by studying the inner workings of our original scripts as well as beloved scripts from popular TV, film and books.
west, water
holistic development:
planet whispering
peer support
You receive personalized support on all angles. This includes ongoing feedback on your work-in-progress, as well as for your alivelihood and your special gifts as a creator.
During our time, Shaunga takes the group through a series of her specialty services designed for holistic development support, including:
• chanelled numerology, astrology, or clairvoyant tarot
• 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
While many writing and creative 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?
Throughout the series you’ll build language, research and design for wealth building models for your work that weave and contribute to:
• abolitionist village building
• solidarity and divestment economies
• landback and rematriation promises
• climate + racial + ecological justice
• unprecedented inventions for liberation
south, earth
practise:
the breath that stopped
a genocide
We begin each session with a warm-up 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 a timeline where we shut down all systems and cultures 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.
This practise doubles as a land-based offering to our host and visionary Black-led space, Wildseed. We’ll have a bowl of water available, and a small altar space if anyone would like to bring offerings to your Self, lineage, and Wildseed.
north, air
keeping time:
stargazing
Finally, we end our weekly warm-up with Shaunga’s stargazing practise.
Here, Shaunga shares a channelled look at the sky, including how she reads the ‘unseen’ elements of the sky, quantum matter, spiritual data, cosmic weather, and primordial animal guardians that appear alongside celestial bodies.
This practise is unique to Shaunga and her lineage, and comes from a 15-year astrological practise and spiritual decolonization journey.
Starting with the sky ensures 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, feeling and communicating with the sky, as well as allow your unique perspective of the sky from where you sit shape and move the direction of your work.
a few criteria
Some things to note upfront:
• this space honours a free palestine and respects our anti-zi0nist jewish friends
• I’d like to work with artists who do not use generative AI to produce their visuals or artwork (this is different than using AI as part of disability related equipment)
• this space honours trans, disabled, queer lived experience, non-normative relationship styles, and honours many of us who know our ancestral storytelling practices come from sex workers, or villages where forms of ‘sex work’ and erotic labour was held as a beloved part of earth-honouring economies, and thriving village life
• in this space, we lovingly and firmly hold each other accountable to the healing and thriving of Blackness, Black feminist spiritual traditions, and Black trans femininity
• we challenge each other to release attachment to the american dream, model minority complex, and capitalist/colonial reality – calling each other deeper home to the thriving of Indigenous people here and around the world, the global south, and our more-than-human relatives
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!
please join us for a
free demo + info session
We are offering our first class on Saturday October 3, 1-4pm at Wildseed as a free demo class and info session.
If you’d like to see what it’s like to hang with the ancestors writers room before you commit, we’d love to see you on october 3.
Accessibility FAQ
Some info on accessibility. Listen to the voice note or read the transcript. Email me at mercury@shaungatagore.com
listen to the note…
or read the note…
On the topic of accessibility, on the registration form, there is a place for you to let me know if you have accessibility needs that would support your participation.
That said, I want to be up front about the fact that I have been working really hard to fundraise for my own accessibility and health needs for the last 3 years, which has been really tough. I’ve lost a lot of income, opportunities and community that I previously could count on, in unexpected ways, for many reasons including my political commitments and advocacy for a free palestine, the nature of my labour advocacy, a transitional season of life, and my commitment to my spiritual practise which has been targeted, criminalized, stigmatized and culturally vilified.
Plus, the nature of the new economy work I’ve been called to, and the ancestral assignments on my shoulders is a huge, huge, huge task, that requires a lot of innovative fundraising efforts that just has been taking a minute to figure out.
All that said, I’ll be running a fundraiser alongside this series throughout the fall. The first thing this fundraiser must do is meet my own accessibility needs. Secondly, I consider things like ASL-Interpretation an essential service for this kind of programming, to ensure that Deaf folks feel welcome in the space. However, this is not a cost that I can cover via ticket sales alone. What I can do is my very best to move my fundraising efforts along…but at the end of the day, accessibility has to be a collective responsibility. There is a limit to what I can do alone without the support of a team or a village, and depending on cost, I may not be able to meet everyone’s accessibility needs for this series. But I welcome collaborative conversation, in places we can put our heads together in making your participation possible.
And I’m actually looking forward to fundraising this fall, there’s some really fun ideas I have, and I welcome anyone who wants to support or work together to raise money for collective care and new economy visions. You can email me if you’d like to chat more about this.
If you are called to join this series on a heart, soul, spirit level, and money is genuinely a barrier, aka, you cannot afford to pay the full rate without it causing self-harm, email me and let me know what is possible for you to contribute. There may be 1-2 options for a work-study scholarship. If you have a genuine need, please get in touch.
If you’re joining the Ancestors Writers Room and you are in a space of financial abundance, you are most welcome to contribute a higher amount of your choosing, that would go toward supporting the space to thrive.