The M is for M/othering Ourselves Webinar Series is celebrating the release of M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs on March 9th 2018.  This webinar series offers a deep dive into the key concepts of Audre Lorde’s work as a queer regenerative resource.

Friday, Saturday Sunday

March 30th-April 1st.

Friday 6pm-9pm Eastern Time

Saturday and Sunday Noon-3pm Eastern Time

“When I have been dead four and a half seasons, dry my words, seek the roots where they grow, down between the swelling of my bones…” —Audre Lorde in her personal diary for 1974, archived at Spelman College

“There is no guarantee that we or our movements will survive long enough to become safely historical…”- Barbara and Beverly Smith, Conditions Four, 1978

Audre Lorde mourned her parents in her writing.  She mourned the relationships she longed for with them, that were never realized.  She mourned them during their lives and after their deaths. And then she wrote about her own confrontations with death as a Black lesbian feminist cancer survivor, who survived until she did not. Almost 20 years before she died, she wrote the epigraph that appears above. Instructions for what to do four and a half seasons after her death.   During her last interview “Above the Wind” she spoke of legacy.  “This work began before I was born and it will continue…but my words will be there.”

This intensive is an opportunity to look at some of Audre Lorde’s published and archival writings and interviews for insight on legacy and daughtering in the face of death.  This is for those of us who are grieving the deaths of people who we have daughtered, parents, mentors and other loved ones.  This is for those of us who play unique roles in caring for the legacies of mentors and historical figures, archivists, literary executors, unlikely heirs.  This is for those of us who are navigating terminal illness in our families and in our own bodies.  This is for all of us, because daughtering is intimate work beyond binary gender and death shapes the urgency of our work to create another world.

Tuition for this three day online intensive is sliding scale $125-275.   All possible payment plans are available. Just let me know.

This intensive is limited to 9 participants. When signing up please remember that this is what some people celebrate as Easter weekend.  Yup. I know.  Death, rebirth and all of that.

Reserve your spot with a $50 (non-refundable) deposit here: 

Send an email to brillianceremastered@gmail.com with your intentions (dreams) for the course by March 25th (that’s Toni Cade Bambara’s birthday by the way!)

M/otherlands: Audre Lorde and Daughtering In Diaspora

Feb 26-28 6pm-9pm Eastern Time

“To the average Grenadian, the United States is a large but dim presence where some dear relative now lives…Grenada is their country.  I am only a relative.”

-Audre Lorde, Grenada Revisited

“But blood will tell, and now the blood is speaking.”

-Audre Lorde, Apartheid USA

Audre Lorde paused the publication of her enduring book of essays Sister Outsider to write about her second visit to Grenada, the country where her mother was from and where her parents met.   In her bio-mythography Zami,
Lorde explains that though she grew up in Harlem, her family never considered the United States “home.”  Home was always in the Caribbean.  And yet, as an adult when Audre Lorde “returned” to Grenada for the first time, it was more complicated.  She learned family secrets that had been hidden for years, she found siblings she had never known about, and when shortly after her first visit the US invaded Grenada, she had to decide how to relate to her power and privilege as a US citizen alongside her solidarity with Grenada as a place of shared and distinct heritage, identity and politics, as a majority-Black socialist state.

Many of us have complicated relationships to parentage, heritage and the idea of home.  This intensive will draw on Audre Lorde’s exploration of this theme especially in regards of her lived and imagined relationships with Black women in Grenada and Carriacou, St. Croix, Anguilla, and South Africa in order to prompt our own insights about daughtership, migration, belonging, longing and ideas of accountability and responsibility.  This intensive is for all of us, and with special accountability to participants who are part of immigrant families or who have migrated without their families, those of us who have been displaced through gentrification and other forms of colonialism, those of us who have had to flee political and/or interpersonal violence and anyone who had a complicated intergenerational to the idea of “home.”

Tuition for this three day online intensive is sliding scale $125-275.   All possible payment plans are available. Just let me know.

This intensive is limited to 9 participants.

Reserve your spot with a $50 (non-refundable) deposit here: 

Send an email to brillianceremastered@gmail.com with your intentions (dreams) for the course by February 22nd.

If you cannot attend the course and want access to a specialized bibliography of readings on this topic by Audre Lorde, APG and other Black feminist and transnational feminist scholars (curated by APG) offer a donation of $25 or more with the note “m/otherlands bibliography” here:  

This intensive is part of the M is for M/othering Ourselves Webinar Series, leading up to the release of M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs on March 9th 2018.  This webinar series offers a deep dive into the key concepts of Audre Lorde’s work as a queer regenerative resource.

Daughter Dreams:  Audre Lorde and the Darkness We Need Now

Tues January 30th to Thurs Feb 1

7pm-10pm Eastern Time

“mother I need your blackness now”

-Audre Lorde in “From the House of Yemanja”

Some say daughters are made of dreams. The unfulfilled dreams of mothers, the unspoken dreams of fathers. In capitalist patriarchy the word “daughter” carries with it obligation, unrewarded labor and generational anxieties that are gendered, racialized, and economic. But what if we can have an experience of daughtering that is NOT bound by patriarchal or binary gender? What if the nightdreams of those of us who are here daughtering escape the predictability of our days?

Audre Lorde documented her dreams and the dreams of her children.  She wrote of nightmares about her mother, police violence, and the academy in her poetry.  She assigned her poetry students to keep dream journals as a major source for the poem that would construct what she called “the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

This intensive is the place where daughter meets water.  Based on Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s essay “Daughter Dreams and the Teaching Life of Audre Lorde,” which activates Audre Lorde’s poetry, essays and journaled dreams to argue for a deep dark queer archive of mothering and daughtering, this online intensive will use writing, reflection, oracles and Black feminist theoretical and poetic praxis to connect each of us to our individual and collective archives of alternate possible lives and a transformed relationship to the complexity of daughter-work.

Tuition for this three day online intensive is sliding scale $125-275.   All possible payment plans are available. Just let me know.

This intensive is limited to 9 participants.

Reserve your spot with a $50 (non-refundable) deposit here: 

Send an email to brillianceremastered@gmail.com with your intentions (dreams) for the course by January 26th.

If you cannot attend the course and want access to a specialized bibliography of readings on this topic by Audre Lorde, APG and other Black feminist scholars (curated by APG) offer a donation of $25 or more with the note “daughter dreams bibliography” here: