A Soulwork Project
Soulwork WritersRoom
An intimate community workshop for Black essayists, memoirists, and archivists. Hosted by Bethany Nicole.
You already have the material.
The essays living in your drafts folder. The memoir chapters you keep returning to. The family photographs and church bulletins and letters you've been collecting for years without knowing exactly what to do with them.
What you don't have yet is the framework that names what you're doing — and locates it inside a tradition of Black writers who have always understood that the interior life is where the argument lives.
That tradition has a name. It's called autotheory.
WHAT AUTOTHEORY IS
Audre Lorde writing about the erotic as power. Saidiya Hartman reconstructing Venus from the archive. Christina Sharpe thinking through wake work at her mother's deathbed. Dionne Brand mapping desire and diaspora in the same breath.
These writers did not choose between rigor and intimacy. They insisted the choice itself was false.
The Soulwork Writers Room teaches you to do the same.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
Your lived experience is already in conversation with someone. A thinker, a framework, a claim about the world that your life is already pushing against or extending or refusing. The first thing this workshop teaches you is how to find them. You'll learn how to read laterally across a tradition and locate the theoretical pressure points already alive in your own material.The second thing is structural. Knowing your interlocutors does not automatically teach you how to put Hartman and your mother in the same paragraph and have both of them land. That is a craft skill. This workshop gives you the tools to hold the lyric and the analytic in the same breath without one swallowing the other.You leave with a draft that is doing both.
WHo this is for
Essayists
You know how to build an argument. This workshop teaches you to put yourself inside it as evidence.
Memoirists
You are already inside your experience. This workshop turns your story into theory.
Archivists
You've been collecting the materials of Black life that don't make it into the official record. This workshop teaches you to write from them.
The Tradition You're Entering
Audre Lorde. bell hooks. Saidiya Hartman. Christina Sharpe. Dionne Brand. Joan Morgan. Tressie McMillan Cottom.
This is the lineage. This is the room they built and left open for you.
hey, i'm bethany nicole
I’m an autotheorist, culture worker, and independent researcher exploring what I call the Racial Capitalist Labor Regime. A proud "Queens girlie", my work lives at the intersection of labor history, womanist theory, and personal narrative.Currently, I’m developing the Soulwork Archive and the Exit Project: a research study documenting the complexities of workforce departures and the pursuit of interior freedom beyond the regime of work.
© Bethany Nicole | Soulwork Archive. All rights reserved.
© Bethany Nicole | Soulwork Archive. All rights reserved.
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