Letting Our Hearts Lead
creating a heart-focused, embodied practice
How does grounding or more heart focus help you write? In Brave Space, we start with an embodiment practice to ground us and bring some mindfulness to our work. This was something I learned from Irene Fornes. She often had us stand up and move our bodies first, or close our eyes and imagine ourselves or our characters in a way that allowed us to become more aware internally. I invite you to wonder how different approaches to writing might change what is able to come through you.
There are so many different ways to do this. As you get ready to write (or make art) this week, each day you might want to pick a different kind of start. Here are links to various approaches: 4-7-8 breathing, butterfly hugs, or 4-4-4-4 box breathing, or The VOO, or some qigong, mindfulness, or metta meditation are 7 different ways to try. I’m a big fan of HeartMath and heart-focused breathing.
Any of these quick techniques help me center myself in my heart before I write. This makes the task of sitting before a blank page or screen much less daunting. Even in this moment when there is so much I want to respond to and only so much I can do. As I let these various practices open my heart to what may be arising within, I can more easily connect to the heart of whatever I’m working on.
This also helps me work through the news with a feeling of possibility and agency. When I am hearing or reading news that is heart-breaking, I tend to naturally place my hand on my heart. I have noticed my tendency to do this, and instead of sitting with my own pain which is so hard to manage, I send compassion into the world. This extra step helps me feel as if I am doing something. Even though there is no evidence that prayers help those prayed for, there is evidence that they help those who pray.
In Writing: often with a narrative, I’ll leave placeholders for where I know I’ll need a scene. Maybe you have these too. If you do, or if you know there’s a scene you need to write, or a scene you’re stuck in, go there and consider the physical bodies of the characters in the scene. Feel what they are feeling in the moment.
I don’t only mean their emotions. I mean, are they well? Are they in physical distress? Is something wrong with them or their environment? Are they sticky from something? How is their gut health? Do they have gas pains? Do they need to pee? What is urging them to leave the room? Are they lying about something or ignoring something or aware of something that needs their attention elsewhere? Characters are always coming from something and somewhere and going somewhere else with all that accompanies those places and things. This helps me keep everything real.
Sometimes I can only feel for/as one character at a time, so I will do a double pass and go through creating a scene focused on one character at a time. This means that the other character’s responses may change when I focus on them, and that’s okay. You can always do another pass.
I find that layering my responses this way helps me construct a deeply felt or more fully realized scene. This doesn’t mean that the characters naturally attune to each other; mostly they are attuned to themselves trying to get what they want which is usually at odds with the other character(s) in the scene.
But this typical approach to narrative (everyone get what you want!) can hinder us from discovering valuable solutions. The idea of the singular protagonist getting or not getting what he/she or they want/need as the basis for so much storytelling is not necessarily helping to push the culture forward.
So you might want to consider letting a protagonist (of any gender) ask for help or create support or work with a team or let your protagonist become an ensemble.
Since we will need to form supportive groups to manage the difficulties ahead, this might be one way to normalize and model ways to create coalition, to offer support and to work in groups, ways to be constructive instead of destructive and ways to harness greater agency and power.
With everything that’s being thrown at us in this moment, I’m taking some time to process through my heart and the wisdom I trust it carries. I have no idea if this practice will resonate, but I’m enjoying a more intentional connection to my heart each time I try it.
As writers and makers of all kinds, we might feel as if the work we are doing isn’t meeting this moment. We might feel as if we are separate or alone. I suggest we let our heart have more of a say in our work as a way toward connection and meaning. See what you can let happen with a more heart-focused practice.
Opportunities:
Ixion is seeking up to 8 scripts where DEFIANCE figures prominently to be considered for further development, including staged readings and possibly full production in June of 2026. No more than 4 actors. Simple setting. No more than 12 pages. Include only first initial and last name of author. Put script name and your last name in header or footer. Multiple subs allowed. No bios. Send to ixionensemble@gmail.com by 5 p.m. 9/30/25. Defiance can be in any form or any situation to explore relationships, dynamics and moments where opposition comes into play, could take on the relationship between a parent and child, and individual versus a collective or even a people versus an entity.
Are you writing poetry in solidarity against capitalism and prisons? Submit here.
Breath of Fire is offering free evenings online to write your play with the amazing Diana Burbano on Wednesdays 630 - 830pm PST. Diana is the Artistic Literary Leader of Breath of Fire, an award-winning playwright, Equity Actor and Teaching Artist for South Coast Rep. From 2/26 - 10/22/25.
Telephone seeks all kinds of creative folks from everywhere in the world to respond to other artists/poets/dancers/etc to create a global community of responses. It is a massively brilliant project (I contributed to), and they want all kinds of creatives involved. Check out what they are doing and reach out to them!
Women in the Arts & Media have a list of opps you can sign up to get monthly.
For poets looking for UK opps, sign up for Angela T. Carr’s Wordbox with monthly opps & more!
For 10-30 min plays for The ReOrient Festival (about the Middle East Or by Middle Eastern writers) til April 30th more info / submit
The Barn’s residencies take place in Lee, Massachusetts -- they offer one residency in the spring (roughly the first full week of June) and one in the fall (roughly the second full week of October). Residents are provided with room, board, working space, and a stipend of $600 for the duration of their stay. These residencies support emerging artists in the performing arts. Reach out to info@thebarnatlee.org with any questions or for more information.
Amazing People Doing Amazing Things:
If you want to be listed here, please let me know what you’re up to and include your links!
For example, 5 of my poems will be published, 1 per week, by Eckleburg.org. The first one dropped Monday 3/24. There will be a new one every Monday for the next month including “My father built homes for settlers in the West Bank,” a sonnet this week!
If you’re in Kansas mid-April, my play, “The Slap of 1973,” will be part of The 42nd William Inge Theatre Festival!
Gina Femia is offering her Novel Writing 101 class! April 12th - May 24th, Saturdays from 4-630pm ET via Zoom.
3/28 - 4/26 Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams are in Two Lesbians Find a Box of Lesbian Erotic in the Woods (they wrote it and star in it) at Here! Click for tickets.
Nikaury Rodriguez is in the cast of Bread of Life by Frank Pagliaro, directed by Leslie Kincaid Burby, produced by Up Theatre uptown running March 26 - April 12th. Tickets here. Sit with me 4/10!
Sheree V. Campbell is in Angel in the Ashes or Goodness Triumphant at LA MAMA 4/3 - 4/13 Tickets here!
Shoshanna Gleich is the Cat in the Hat in SEUSSICAL at Art/NY 5/8-18 Tickets Here!
SUR: The Trojan Women Project Sat. 3/29 to 4/6 in New York @ LA MAMA'S ELLEN STEWART THEATRE. https://www.lamama.org/sur/ or more info here
JOIN 100 Days of Creative Resistance! free email of encouragement, opposition, and commiseration — a reminder of why we write and create — from 100 iconoclastic contemporary voices on each of the first 100 days of the 47th president’s regime.
Audrey Cephaly has written a great Substack on How to Write the 10 Minute Play - I highly recommend her Substack every day, and especially this one.
Take a Poetry Workshop with Only Poems.
Playwrights! If you’re not already subscribed to Mark Ravenhill’s free newsletter for his 101 exercises for playwrights, you might want to click here to do that. If you’ve missed them, reach out and I’ll send you a pdf of the 1st 53, and a pdf of 54 - now. So you won’t have to search through the endless Twitter-verse for random entries.
Brave Space
With prompts, grounding practices, & discussions, Brave Space invites playwrights, poets, painters, potters, novelists, memoirists, musicians & artists working in any medium to make meaning in a safe community. Begin and/or bring your projects to completion. Or use Brave Space as a body-doubling space to get other things done in community. $5-25 suggested per session. 4+x/week! On or off camera. No commitment, drop-ins welcome. Try it!
The Brave Space Schedule:
Mondays & Wednesdays at 12pm ET; Fridays at 12pm ET w/fast feedback; and Sundays at 6pm ET with Sharing Second Sundays at 730pm ET (that means this Sunday April 13th!!!) Email for a link!
I will be in Kansas 4/16 - 4/20, so Brave Space will be on hiatus.
artwork by Scott Sherman at ScottShermanStudio on Instagram
Fabulous, Emma!