Why Me

Dear Mammals, 

Why Me? Why should you take this leap of faith, devote your time and energy, spend your hard earned money, and join me in this lateral art making revolution? BTW, I say LATERAL because I am merely your guide. Your leader. But I don’t harbor any secret knowledge or tools that I can just slip into your inbox and you come out a best selling author. What I do have is experience, teacher-lady tools and buckets and buckets of belief in YOU. 

But my teacher-lady tools aren’t quite like the ones you’ll find in those shiny ivory towers. I went to one. Several times. Flunked out twice, quit once. But eventually I chased down the Ph.D, and academia gave me a “place” to set my intellectual curiosity on fire. I found a few teachers that didn’t treat me like a messy writer girl in combat boots who had infiltrated the smart people room. They treated me like I deserved to be there, potty mouth and all, they helped make a space for me to rage and ride my own intellect.

But, here’s the thing: You shouldn’t have to chase down a Ph.D and hope to get lucky with actual good teachers to ride your own intellect. And I promise you, you have one. You just have to let it out. And I think it is caged in your body. And I intend to have a “place” for you to put it, and you deserve to feel like you belong there. 

My first online course is Metamorphoses: New Forms From the Body in Language. The first week’s topic is “The Body as an Epistemological Site.” Epistemology is “the study of how meaning is made.” The body as an epistemological site just means the body is "a place where meaning is generated.” Now up in those high ass ivory towers there is a whole epistemological tradition, and whether you know it or not, that shit has been passed down and down and down through the hierarchies to you. But the knowledge is narrow. So narrow it left most of us out. Threw us right out the tiny window at the tippy top of the tower. 

But there were people who helped me pull myself out of the gutter I landed in and discover an artistic path. I'd likely be dead, incarcerated, or just numb beyond words had key people in my life not reached out to me and shown me a canvas, a page. So I feel like my job in life is to return that favor before I'm too old or dead. So let me give it to you. I’m building a “place” for you to set YOUR curiosity on fire. Wake YOUR body up and let it create meaning. No prerequisites. No grades. No rules. Just meaning making. And that’s why me.

SO? How about you? Why You? I hope you’ll tell me. You have a body. You have a life story. And you HAVE the ability to make meaning with it. You don’t need their narratives. Their approval. Their sanctions. You just need you. And a community of others who want to partake in the life-as-an-art-making-process. So, yes, me. And, yes, you. All of us. Laterally remaking and reinventing and creating meaning. 

I hope you’ll join us.

xoxo,

Lid