She Holds the Light Within Her
“The Light Keeper” Берегиня Світла artwork by displaced Ukrainian photographer Ksenia Lisna What does my art mean to me: Coming as I do from a port city and shipbuilding centre in the southern region of Ukraine, the ethos of sea, sky, and steppe are never far away. Mykolayiv is situated on the river Buh, which flows into The Black Sea. Here, the water is deep. During the Cold War, Mykolayiv included a military base,...
Claiming What’s Ours
On Claiming What’s Ours (A Distinctly Feminine Examination) In the Spring of 2022, TIDES heard the call from our Literary Ancestor Audre Lorde: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” We asked ourselves: What if AROHO removed “master” and its...
Your Work Matters
We see each woman’s work as a brush stroke in the portrait of creative women. If the way in to our deepest work is by invitation, come, reveal yourself: The invitation my creative heart wants to receive is ___. The invitation my creative heart wants to give is ___. Contribute your response Submit your creative work to Waves _________________________________________________________ ...
We Are Bonded By Women’s Long History
Dear Creative Woman, It is important to understand that women’s culture is never a subculture. It would hardly be appropriate to define half of humanity as a subculture. “The Creation of Patriarchy” by Gerda Lerner _________________________________________________________ This eye is not for weeping its vision must be unblurred though tears are on my face its intent is clarity ...
Together, Our Life Our Art
My dear women artists. Here together, we’re generating the faith and the hope that by being together we can help one another make the writing life easier, make the writing life joyous. I remember as a girl – I think I was about eight years old – when I said “Oh, the writer’s life is for me.” And then, not too many years after that, “Oh, why did I want that?” . . . Do we have to make a choice between life and art? ...
A Message of Courage, Love and Hope
In an AROHO demitasse . . . we spoke about the reality of our bodies making the art that we make. What sheds off. What’s observed through the window-pane. What’s left. What’s still arriving. What the frequency is. Through these words, typed as dusk falls in East England, the sky an indigo tilt, I send you a message of courage, love and hope. For your practice. For your work. For who you are becoming: alongside the...
Braiding Water and Light
“Is there a way that art-making or writing practice is a way of stepping out of toxic lineage, as much as it is a braiding or weaving of water and light?” — Bhanu Kapil Submit your response “I wished that woman would write . . . so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard of songs.” — Hélène...
Conjuring Sisterhood
A GATHERING LIKE NONE OTHER — GIFT EXCHANGE, NO POSTAGE. “We should conjure sisterhood wherever we can.” — Ava Duvernay _________________________________________________________ “One Moment” by Sylvan Adams Read More Donate and Join A Room of Her Own with Bhanu Kapil “I am ready to release the devastating gasps of self-doubt and debilitating fear. My breath shall be pure...
Bring to Life What’s in Your Heart and Mind
OUR WAY IS SISTERHOOD AND RECIPROCITY Our global sisterhood is growing, and it matters. Your donation makes room for us all. We thank you. Give to AROHO and receive gifts of sisterhood Donate “As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister … ” — Gloria Anzaldúa “37th Floor” by Mimi Dobelle...
We Leave Deep Impressions As We Walk
OUR ROOM. OUR WORK. OUR WAY. This year’s Global Summer Camp summoned a growing circle of women who crave AROHO’s uniquely personal, artistic program that seamlessly weaves wisdom sharing into the fold of sisterhood. “AROHO brings me into a circle of artistic friends; like-minded, focused, adventurous women who, by definition, welcome, encourage, and respect me, and the work I do. This gift of inclusion helps me...
Come Be With Us En El Jardin
Dear Creative Woman, WE ARE FROM THE DESERT, THE DEEP FOREST, THE CLEARING BY THE RIVER, A UNIVERSE OF SECRET GARDENS. “Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.” — May Sarton “In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.” — Alice Walker “En El Jardin” by Karina Puente,...
That Which is Created Out of Chaos
OUR WORK IS PROGRESS. Each one of us has the authority to speak urgently, moving beyond barriers to physical connection. Month after endless month, sister creatives have forged personal rooms spanning space and time. In competition at times with workplace productivity metrics, our children’s growth, and the tenuous safety of all, where does our creative well-being fit? Since 2019, WAVES has served as a vessel for our narratives and...
Our Rooted Boundlessness
OUR ROOM IS SACRED. We honor our evolving self-agency as creative women and insist on our responsibility to each other by entering shared space with profound mutual respect for our personal time, dignity, artistry, ancestors, and culture. Original sharing, August 10, 2020, Inaugural Global Summer Camp Lend Your Voice and Vision to WAVES Submit “Stream of Reason” by Hilary Druley ...
Woman’s Voice Singing Songs From the Savage Lands
…[they] heard a woman’s voice singing, as if to her babies, a song so high and clear, it matched the flutes…She brought her songs back from the savage lands. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts It’s always important to tell the truth because if you don’t, there are all kinds of terrible social and psychological consequences. There are implosions...
The tide of creative women is rising in waves
This Women’s History Month we are invited to consider the gifts of our hard-won “irrevocably altered vision.” Shaped by heroic journeys and the braid of our collective memory, our circle of sister ancestors shoulder to shoulder with contemporary sister creatives is a tide rising in WAVES. —what haunts us and what we would rather not inhabit, {is} the gulf between what is and what should be. The tool we marshal to cross our gulf...
A dream that won’t let us sleep. Answer the thumping from within.
This Black History Month, the world is buoyed by the beauty and power of Amanda S. C. Gorman, first National Youth Poet Laureate, and the legacy of Anna Julia Cooper, whose 1892 classic feminist text, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, argued for both racial and gender equality. Each of us, as creative sisters, has a dream that won’t let us sleep. “I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl...
Reaching the water in time. Beginning anew.
It seems we are hardwired to take stock on New Year’s. Dreams of a creative life, elusive but persistent like a loose tooth, negotiate their way onto a list in a new journal or – if too crazy, too impossible – scream their way out of our consciousness. At the New Year, we are supposed to begin anew but how do the leftovers of last year’s creative intentions allow space for this year’s? How do we begin anew day...
No Matter What State I’m In I Can Be Beautiful
How easy it is for us to find beauty in our creative sisters. In contrast, what images of our own creative selves do we tolerate or, worse, defend? Made from photos of her that she had previously rejected, “Self Portrait” taught Amber J. Deltorchio that “no matter what state I’m in I can be beautiful.” How can our artistic approach flip our perspective? Imagine what can be learned from our creative sisters. We crown our 20th year with...
Healing Across Time and Space
Dear Creative Woman, To begin to comprehend our need for each other, consider the medieval pair Hildegard von Bingen (a mystic cloistered from age eight) and Eleanor of Aquitaine (a queen imprisoned by her husband for sixteen years), who forged an epistolary relationship. Today, we are no longer forced to wait patiently for letters to cross seas, yet our connection is equally precious....
And Rose Our Voices Like Waves
Dear Creative Woman, Today we respond to the call of our times and our community to release the confluence of women’s voices — both from our anthology and new work — into shared, published WAVES. Our New WAVES “Dragging Virginia Woolf’s Body Out of the Ouse” WAVES digital cover art by Christy Sheffield Sanford, Artist in Residence, Global Day Camp, Oct. 24 ...
I have not yet written a single page by daylight.
Harriet Jacobs
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The Q: Does your creative process have a rhythm like the waves?
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Ritual Oct 25, 2024
