THE ART OF ENDINGS
This offering was completed in January of 2024, Stay tuned for our next iteration.
A Grieving Workshop / A Dream Cave / A Seminar / A Together Place
For those people navigating the particular grief and losses of
Relationship Deaths and/or Transitions
WHAT
Over the course of 7 Zoom sessions (of 90-minute length) together, spread out over the span of 11 weeks, an intimate cohort of grievers will come together.
Together we will have the opportunity to :
Wail together about living losses that feel as large as a universe / as large as our capacities to love
Re-imagine our lives in the wildest way possible
Hold each other accountable to small every day actions in nature that will become the beginnings of new connection
Speak out loud
Goals for getting through short-term hardships
Dreams we hold so deep inside ourselves that they may just be glimmers
Griefs both fresh and the ones before our time - what can they reveal about our stories? How do they speak to one another?
Our divine strengths that will guide us to new places. This will be a place to celebrate strengths, joys, and all of the wins.
Our wildest desires
Take in writing, audio and visual creations by artists that grapple with the questions of survival and love amidst great heartache.
Write our own paths through using the fertile yet heavy soil of this grief-laden place we find ourselves in. Make space in this soil to grow things we cannot yet imagine or understand.
Participants will also have the opportunity to join 1 small group session of no more than 3-4 participants to process and deep dive. This space will be held by Resham Mantri. For anyone in the NYC/Brooklyn area, there is an additional opportunity for an in-person meeting.
WHO
This gentle container will be held by death doulas, artists, and creative collaborators, Resham Mantri of The Community Deathcare Digest and Trishia Frulla of HypoFutures. Through The Community Deathcare Digest, co-creators Resham Mantri and Eliana Yoneda have been co-facilitating death cafe spaces, publishing a bi-weekly digest, and creating installation art for over a year that speak to the complexities and potential of grief and dying spaces.
Resham Mantri is a death doula, divorced single co-parent and grieving/loving writer and artist who believes in the fertile soil of the in-between spaces for great dreaming and imagination. She is the creator of The In-Between, an online publication of her heart and mind and the co-creator of The Community DeathCare Digest, a biweekly newsletter that explores how we die in community alongside mutual aid requests. She creates installation and performance art that has been shown in Brooklyn where she lives with her two children, her mother and their dog Freddie. In relationship grief work, Resham brings all of the tools she has been trained in and practices. These include many years as a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn Family Court working with children and families experiencing hard transitions, her experience as a death doula, her work within restorative justice practices navigating divorce and relationship work, and her ongoing friendship with her childrens’ co-parent. Her work as a writer and artist are her foundational dreamscapes which she will bring to this offering through essays, poems, podcasts, and literature.
Trishia Renee Frulla (she/they/siya) is a queer, Pilipinx artist and death worker memorializing experiences of grief and joy. They are the creator of HypoFutures, an experimental creative studio that creates holistic offerings, design experiences, art installations, and writing around death, grief, rest, joy, and relational trauma.
Trishia’s art has included tactile installations such as her TrauMonsters series, and “Cold Girl” — a digital illustration series sharing the darkly humorous journey of an autobiographical character. Currently, Trishia hosts death cafes for grieving folk as part of her healing practice in art spaces as well as parks, rests whenever her body tells her, and hosts gratitude dinners for her chosen family. Trishia holds a Bachelors of Arts in Studio Art from California State University, Long Beach, and a certification in user experience (UX) design from General Assembly. Her work has been shown in New York City, Southern California and Canada.
Eliana Yoneda (Doula of this offering) is a writer/artist/creative human, elder care partner, end of life planner, perpetual student and co-creator of The Community DeathCare Digest. She has lived many lives and worn many hats including (but not limited to): podcaster, stained glass fabricator, office manager, herbalist, server/hostess, teacher, and event planner. All of these disparate experiences have led her towards a greater understanding of humanity and relational dynamics. For the last three years she has practiced various forms of grief work, assisting others in wading through grief to access a grounded sense of renewal and joy. Much of this work has been rooted in her own experiences of parent loss and navigating compounding griefs and informed by her interest in ancestral inheritance, connection and communion. Currently, she is in the throes of writing her first novel and integrating back into her physical community/reality by prioritizing offline connection and relationships. She works as an elder care partner at the local senior center and provides in-home elder organizational support in her hometown of Fort Bragg, California.
Our Esteemed Guest Contributors will offer their experience and artistry to help create this container together in 5 of our sessions.
Anne Ishii - writer and musician based in Philadelphia+New York and the executive director of Asian Arts Initiative. Publishes https://www.ill-iterate.com/
Natasha Kealoha is an astrologer based out of Sacramento, California. She has loved astrology ever since she was 9-years-old, but it wasn’t until 2020 that she turned her passion for the subject into a career. She has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Social Sciences with an emphasis in Psychology from the University of Hawai’i—West O’ahu. Her background in studying the often hidden aspects of behavior and the mind has helped her to discover the often hidden aspects of the Self in a birth chart. Natasha offers personal astrological readings via Zoom, where she meets each person exactly where they’re at, and with deep compassion helps them to uncover who they truly are free from the projections and opinions of the external world. She also teaches small, in-person astrology workshops, contributes monthly astrological insights for an international digital newsletter called Weave the Web, and writes her own astrological newsletter where she focuses on one major alignment every month, which helps to bring clarity, support, and empowerment as we navigate great change personally and collectively. For more information about Natasha or her offerings, please visit her website at https://www.natashakastrology.com/.
Le’Andra LeSeur - Le’Andra LeSeur is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses a range of media including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. LeSeur’s body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. Through the insertion of her body and voice into her work, she provides her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, family, Black grief and joy, the experience of invisibility, and what it means to take up space as a queer Black woman—a rejection of the stereotypes which attempt to push these identities to the margins.
Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, and BOMB Magazine, among many other publications. She is in the process of co-editing the first monograph on the 1990s lesbian gallery and project space TRIAL BALLOON. Soboleva was the 2020-2021 Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the 2021-2023 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History at the New York Historical Society. She is an Adjunct Professor at the New School.
LeSeur and Soboleva are the Co-Creators of the HeartBr(Ache) Club. The Heartbr(ache) Club is a collaboration between Le’Andra LeSeur and Ksenia M. Soboleva, that takes the form of a curatorial initiative and an oral history project. Negating the notion of being broken open as a finale, LeSeur and Soboleva consider the generative potential of aching, and suggest heartbr(ache) as a precondition for living a queer life.
Fariha Róisín - multidisciplinary artist, born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Los Angeles, California. As a Muslim queer Bangladeshi, she is interested in the margins, liminality, otherness, and the mercurial nature of being. Her work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam, and queer identities and has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Vice, Village Voice, and others.
Annie Seaton - Annie Seaton has worked with QTBIPOC art collective, How Do You Say Yam in African, as a conceptual strategist and lecture-performance artist and experience designer since 2009. While she is currently a scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, Annie’s approach to teaching and learning is greatly influenced by her past as a high school dropout who also failed 8th grade. Annie recognized that she was queer at 6, and began reading Baudelaire, Marx, and Sappho soon after. This resulted in an unsanctioned eugenics experiment at Annie’s 2nd grade school, where she was placed in a room and accused by several different teachers of faking her reading ability. Annie’s many experiences of educational trauma have honed a pedagogy rooted in “getting out of the way” of her students. She has mentored many disruptive, unwieldy, underrepresented artists/thinkers, and hopes to learn from you.
WHO IS THIS FOR
Any human who is struggling in the space of relationship transition and/or endings.
(If over the course of this offering the relationship transitions out of hardness and/or mends itself, this offering will still be useful in growing the seeds of listening to our deepest desires. The only constant is change. )
We acknowledge the myriad types of relationships that end with great impact to our hearts AND in order to create the most cohesive helpful community, mean to limit relationships here to mean:
Romantic relationships
Intimate partnerships
Loving/life-collaborating friendships (that may not have a intimacy component)
People going through various kinds of separation/ divorce
Those suffering heartbreak connected to loss of all the above and/or other losses of community
There will be a writerly and/or artistic lens to this offering. This offering may be most helpful for people who enjoy creative writing, reading, artistic expression in any capacity or have the desire to explore this practice as a means of survival. We will assign readings, audio and visual treats by artists who wrestle with questions around radical re-imagining and art as a mechanism to survive heartache. We will have opportunities for writing through and around this new heartscape.
Some of the sample writers we may reference and love:
bell hooks
Kim Tallbear
Elena Ferrante
Alok Vaid-Menon
Octavia Butler
We acknowledge the deep and specific type of grief around relationship loss and ending that is also tied to harmful abuses. In this container, while we will make space for the various shapes of deep griefs, we will not have capacity for individual trauma-based work and urge those who need it to find every single tool on earth in this moment of transition. You deserve as many tools and modalities as you can find. All of them!
Here we will focus on dreaming as a modality of survival within a community of people who are facing similar types of heartache and loss.
We also come to relational pain and transition from a place of Restorative Justice practices.
Restorative Justice is a set of principles and practices rooted in indigenous societies. Restorative justice can be applied both reactively in response to conflict and/or crime, and proactively to strengthen community by fostering communication and empathy.
Only from a place of safety can we begin to recognize some of our core values:
Often people who hurt us are also hurting and/or traumatized people.
There can be release of anger and blame from our hearts, at whatever point in time release and acceptance is meant to occur. We do this for ourselves and our capacities to love ourselves and others more fully.
We aim to never replicate the carceral systems of oppression that limit our imaginations towards punishment and shame, and turn ourselves towards universal love that connects us to all living beings.
We do this because ultimately we are creatures that seek connection, we heal and thrive in communities of care.
COST/ EXCHANGE
$375-450 -sliding scale for all 7 sessions, plus 1 small group session. (8 sessions total or $46-56/session investment)
(Note re: sliding scale: This entire offering and the ability to pay everyone involved livable wages depends on those who can afford the full $450 investment to pay that, and we appreciate your time in considering this investment as one you are also making in the lives of the healers/artists giving their time to create this container. Thank you so much!)
(This offering is designed as a progression together, not necessarily a drop-in model. We hope to create a sense of community through as steady an attendance as is possible.)
Offering will be capped at 30 people.
At least 1 half price scholarship and 1 full scholarship will be available. Please submit scholarship request here.
WHEN
October 19 - Opening Session
October 26 - (Contributor Session)
November 2 - (Contributor Session)
November 16 - (Contributor Session)
November 30 - (Contributor Session)
December 14 - (Contributor Session)
January 4 - Closing Session
Plus an additional small group session date, of no more than 4 people, will be announced later.
7-8:30 PM EST, 4-5:30 PM PT, on Zoom