Last week’s Brilliance Remastered Webinar (the Spill Intensive) was miraculous.   We investigated our long-held narratives, decisions we had outgrown, and systems of oppression we had internalized and addressed them on intellectual, creative, and on the deep level of what Audre Lorde calls the “non-european consciousness” (sometimes also known as the subconscious).  We also found enduring affirmations, core sources of inspiration and boundless power in our spiritual and community-activated practices and beliefs.  I am so excited about the intellectual lives these brave visionaries are living and I am honored beyond words to be part of what sustains their work!   Really I don’t want this intensive to be over, but the praise dance of what it felt like is staying with me always!  This last collective poem of the Spill Intensive outflow includes the realness we are taking with us into the future and the ancestral chorus says uh huh!!!

uh huh

enduring affirmations from the Spill Webinar Participants

daily practicing of heart attunement

(uh huh)  (uh huh)  (uh huh)

listening to what love demands

(be still)  (be still)  (and know)

my heart is open and speaking

(yes) (yes) (yes)

gardenias in the hands of my grandma

(alright) (uh huh) (enough)

our boundless creative life force

(uh huh) (amen) (ashe)

i am enough. we are enough

(amen) (ashe) (say that!)

sistering is on purpose!

(mmhmm) (uh huh) (oh yeah)

directed by desire!

(amen) (ashe) (all the way)

water and wishes everywhere

(uh huh) (that’s right) (that’s right)

dancing the freedom into being

(mmhmm) (uh huh)  (ooowee)

soul stirring songs in my heart

(uh huh)  (that’s right) (amen)

full belly breathing

(uh huh) (uh huh) (at last)

when we laugh we laugh all over

(oh yes) (oh yes) (oh yes)

alive all the way through my cheekbones

(YASS!) (uh huh) (that’s right)

Fannie Lou’s courage in my mouth

(uh huh) (amen) (amen)

joy in my hair follicles, bliss in my pinky toe

(that’s right) (that’s right) (uh huh)

letting this animal body loves what it loves

(mmhmm)  (uh huh)  (all day)

remembering that we are stardust and using that magic moment by moment

(again) (again) (again)

conspiring with the ancestors to let the writing flow

(amen)  (ashe)  (do that!)

the embers of houses built on fear burned to the ground

(yup) (yup) (yup)

miracles and magic in the mundane

(uh huh) (alright) (okay)

love is the ultimate lifeforce

(amen) (uh huh) (ashe)

****

Yes!!! If you love all of that sign up for this week’s 3 day intensive based on Spill! Details here:

How She Knew: The Fugitive Epistemologies Intensive

Weds-Friday, January 4-6, 2017  6pm-9pm Eastern 

*epistemologies = ways of knowing

The Spill Series is a  group of 10 webinars activating the literary archive, technology and text of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity as a resource for our far-flung community of freedom seekers.  (You don’t have to have read Spill to participate, but you might as well read it anyway

Fugitive Epistemologies is based on the first chapter of Spill “How She Knew” and honors black women’s intimate ways of knowing.  Drawing on the chapter’s literary influences (Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks) and using the chapter itself as oracle and meditation, the purpose of the intensive is to start the new year and time of this renewed blatantly violent global regime with access to forms of knowing that go beyond the dominant news media, beyond intellectual reaction catch phrases and beyond the systemic pull of institutions to make fear fundable.

This online intensive is for freedom-seekers who are interested in intimate knowing, knowing otherwise, refusal as knowledge and trusting forms of knowledge that have been criminalized.  Some of the forms of knowledge we will explore together will include working with dreams, divination, internal and external meditation and recipes.

Registration is limited.  Reserve your spot with a $50 deposit here and write “How She Knew Intensive”: 

Full tuition is sliding scale $185-225.  Payment plans are available.  Your deposit goes towards the full tuition.

Email brillianceremastered@gmail.com with your goals for the course by Monday January 2nd.

Last night the Brilliance Remastered Spill Webinar participants let it all go, decided how we wanted to feel, and invited divine guides to lead us on our way.   One thing is for sure, we are not settling or half-stepping in this lifetime!

Why be content?

Divine discontent from the Spill Webinar Participants

After Hortense Spillers: “Why be content with the lightning bug, when you can have the lightning?” (“Ellison’s Usable Past, 65)

why be content sometimes when you can have always?!?!?

why be content with fear when you can be free?

why be content with critiquing when you can create?

why be content with vagaries when you can have vision?

why be content with promotion when you can have possibilities?

why be content with colleagues when you can have community?

why be content with jumping through the hoops when you can live your LIFE?

why be content with time management when you can have eternity?

why be content with interns when you can have intuitive alignment!

why be content with costumes when you can have closeness?

why be content with the answers when you can have the sweet taste of endless mystery?

why be content with advances when you can be a prophet?

why be content with labels when you can have spirit?

why be content with borders when you can have life?

why be content with habits when you can have healing?

P.S.  To read/hear Alexis read the “Why Be Content with the Lightning Bug When You Can Have the Lightning” excerpt of the Spill manuscript in process check out the queer issue of As Us:  http://asusjournal.org/queer-issue/alexis-gumbs-fiction/

Last night the Spill Webinar participants, shared dreams, got embodied, mapped strategic decisions (and others) and stomped three times hard enough to unshackle somebody.  This poem is made up of the titles of memoirs that we will be able to write based on the changes we are making in our lives right now.   Brilliance Remastered. Forthcoming

How I Got Ovah

Future Memoirs of the Spill Webinar Participants

(with gratitude to Carolyn Rodgers, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam and more!)

How I Turned Excellence Into Excess

How I Said Yes When the Universe Asked Me to Dance

How I Got My Life in the Life

How I Stopped Proving My Genius to White People (co-authored with Phillis Wheatley)

How I Started an Organization to Save My Own Life and Yours

How I Made Family Through Radical Intellectual Conversation

How I Made a House a Queer Home

How I Let the Ancestors Dance Forever

How I Brought Mindfulness to Writing

How I Created Space for Intergenerational Healing

How I Let a Love Blossoming Through Tumblr Change My Life

How I Learned to Sing Like Fannie Lou Hamer

How I Learned to Be the Value of My Time

How I Became Present for the Broadness of My Vision

How I Got Ovah

Sign up is now open for the first webinar in the 2017 Spill Webinar Series.

How She Knew: The Fugitive Epistemologies Intensive

Weds-Friday, January 4-6, 2017  6pm-9pm Eastern 

*epistemologies = ways of knowing

The Spill Series is a  group of 10 webinars activating the literary archive, technology and text of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity as a resource for our far-flung community of freedom seekers.  (You don’t have to have read Spill to participate, but you might as well read it anyway

Fugitive Epistemologies is based on the first chapter of Spill “How She Knew” and honors black women’s intimate ways of knowing.  Drawing on the chapter’s literary influences (Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks) and using the chapter itself as oracle and meditation, the purpose of the intensive is to start the new year and time of this renewed blatantly violent global regime with access to forms of knowing that go beyond the dominant news media, beyond intellectual reaction catch phrases and beyond the systemic pull of institutions to make fear fundable.

This online intensive is for freedom-seekers who are interested in intimate knowing, knowing otherwise, refusal as knowledge and trusting forms of knowledge that have been criminalized.  Some of the forms of knowledge we will explore together will include working with dreams, divination, internal and external meditation and recipes.

Registration is limited.  Reserve your spot with a $50 deposit here and write “How She Knew Intensive”: 

Full tuition is sliding scale $185-225.  Payment plans are available.  Your deposit goes towards the full tuition.

Email brillianceremastered@gmail.com with your goals for the course by Monday January 2nd.

Last night Brilliance Remastered‘s Spill Webinar for sustainable strategies to build an intellectual life that exceeds the boundaries of the academic industrial complex continued. We worked with our dreams (as in intentions) and our dreams (as in the layered picture show that happens while we are asleep) as resources informing each other.  We looked at what is at stake ancestrally in the way we structure our intellectual lives.  We claimed our power as alchemists to turn what we have into what we need by bringing our transformative questions to the table.   This is the poem that we created together to describe the changes we are here to see through to reality.

turning paper into food

by the participants in the Spill Webinar

how do we turn fear into love?

how do we turn worry into wishes?

how do we turn attention into attunement?

how do we turn hope into happiness?

how do we turn concern into courage?

how do we turn care into creativity?

how do we turn today into a portal?

how do we turn our bodies into magic?

how do we turn shame into a wholehearted embrace?

how do we turn walls into bridges?

how do we turn thought into action?

how do we turn caterpillars into butterflies?

how do we turn promises into pages?

how do we turn bravery into blessings?

how do we turn fixity into movement?

how do we turn jobs into journeys?

how do we turn one into we?

how do we turn the ocean into words?

how do we turn words into the ocean?

how do we turn markets into communities of accountability?

how do we turn gatekeepers into prophets?

how do we turn training into underground railroad stations?

how do we turn survival into a promise?

how do we turn proof into possibility?

how do we turn righting into writing?

how do we turn teaching into truth telling?

how do we turn interventions into invitations?

how do we turn novelty into knowing?

how do we turn talking into drumcall beating hearts?

how do we turn boxes into breathing?

how do we turn birth into being?

*note: if you be asking yourself these same questions…you must be a Brilliance Remastered kindred spirit.  Put yourself on the email list right here.
.

Last night was the first session of Brilliance Remastered’s newest and most experimental webinar intensive: SPILL.  We experimented with sinking in, visualizing what we are immersed in, releasing, remembering the ground, examining lit candles that have already burned out on altars to our fears and more!   The participants in the Spill webinar are going deep together and designing alternative intellectual projects and they are bringing along what Audre Lorde calls “the non-european consciousness” (some other people call it the subconscious mind) to transform everything.   All of the activities in the Spill Webinar are based on an oracle text of freedom scenes I wrote, drawn from Hortense Spillers’ asides in the crucial literary critical text Black, White and In Color.  Our closing group poem last night draws on the phrase “quirkiness of conception” from her introduction to her enduring book of essays.   What if you were having your best idea yet all day long?

Update: 10/21/16 If you want to sign up for the next Brilliance Remastered Intensive, here is some information about the Black Boundlessness Intensive.

quirkiness of conception

(excerpt from Spill by Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

the first time i thought of you, you were swimming, towards you, through me.  first time i thought i was drowning in a world that needed you in it or it would disappear. first time i knew you existed the rest of the history of the world popped like a bubble unready unworthy and my body wanted only future, only you.   the first time i felt you move we were deep underwater under something built to keep us under and i couldn’t see anything but i understood there was something above everything.  above everything despite everything i would find fresh air and breathe again.  above everything despite everything i would free you.  my best idea yet.

my best idea yet

by the participants in the Spill Webinar

waking up when i wake up, my best idea yet

letting happiness lead, my best idea yet

daring to hope, my best idea yet

curious my best idea yet

seeking spirit guidance, my best idea yet

believing in believing, my best idea yet

experimenting with being present, my best idea yet

loving this being, my best idea yet

appreciating being alive and in this body, my best idea yet

listening to my body, my best idea yet

full belly breathing, my best idea yet

being well, my best idea yet

sitting on the floor, my best idea yet

dancing, my best idea yet

praying before responding to emails about money, my best idea yet

listening to the whispers of ancestors, my best idea yet

choosing, my best idea yet

touching the water, my best idea yet

hugging my loved ones, my best idea yet

nurturing intimacy, my best idea yet

allowing myself to be understood or mysterious my best idea yet

honoring my brilliance and everyone else’s my best idea yet

surrendering to the creative processes, my best idea yet

writing what I want to write, my best idea yet

teaching who I want to teach, my best idea yet

learning, still, my best idea yet

cultivating my ability to stay if i want to, my best idea yet

leaving if I want to, my best idea yet

making time for pleasure, my best idea yet

going to sleep when I am tired, my best idea yet

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.”

― Audre Lorde

7pm Weds Oct 29th

This is an informational webinar with Alexis Pauline Gumbs especially for people who are applying or considering applying to graduate school THIS WINTER.   Our conversation will include the crucial aspects of:

• remembering your purpose for going to graduate school and your accountability to the communities you love
• distinguishing YOUR application from the record number of applications graduate schools are receiving this cycle
• the steps to identifying an intellectual community you WANT to be part of for the next phase of your life

Reserve your spot for free or with a donation here:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/quality-of-light-webinar-the-poetics-of-entering-graduate-school-tickets-13783497813

Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs was admitted to several of the best graduate programs in her field with full funding.   She chose to get her PhD in English with certificates in African and African American Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University.  She was able to deepen her relationship to the intellectual traditions that informed her and the communities that created her during her time in graduate school by fostering meaningful and supportive relationships with her faculty mentors, student colleagues and local community.   Today, she balances writing influential  intellectual work on black feminism and Caribbean women’s writing with public scholarship and the ongoing creation of her own intergenerational and intergalactic educational initiatives Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind and The Mobile Homecoming Project.

The Spill Intensive: Sustainable Strategies for Exceeding the Boundaries of the Academic Industrial Complex   Webinar October 20th-24th 9pm EST

Coming out of the insights of the recent Shape of My Impact back to school webinar, The Spill Intensive is an experimental space for those visionaries who want to honor the ways their inspiration, spiritual imperatives and accountability to oppressed communities EXCEED the boundaries of the University system.

Using an innovative curriculum based on Sista Docta Alexis Pauline’s decade of work on the brilliant excess of the language practice of black feminist literary critic Hortense Spillers, the Spill Intensive invites 9 webinar participants to

• inhabit scenes of stolen freedom
• interrogate internalized capitalist default practices
• and activate practices that make tangible space in our lives and in the world for the unruly brilliance that our ancestors and our communities demand!

The intensive will meet online every night for 1 hour and 30 minutes at 9pm EST Oct 20th-24th. Fee: $200  Reserve your spot with an email to brillianceremastered@gmail.com explaining what you hope to get out of the course and your $50 deposit:

Last night community accountable intellectuals from all over the United States and also from northern Haiti came together to discuss survival and the academic industrial complex.  The conversation was rich, rigorous, honest and brave and included the participation of many of our beloved given and chosen ancestors.  At the end of our time together we created this poem, riffing off on of Audre Lorde’s unpublished definitions of survival that we offer right now towards your broadened, abundant ancestor-activated survival of the institutions and possibilities you are navigating right now.

Sounds Like a Promise

a group poem by the participants in the Shape of My Impact Webinar

“I love the word survival, it always sounds to me like a promise.  It makes me wonder sometimes though, how do I define the shape of my impact upon this earth?”

 –reflection cut from an early draft of “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger” by Audre Lorde (Audre Lorde Papers, Spelman College Archive)

health and joy sound like a promise

freedom sounds like a promise

courage sounds like a promise

the future sounds like a promise

reproduction and birth sounds like a promise

being here and being well sounds like a promise

a university that loves me like the universe sounds like a promise

survival sounds like a promise

my body sounds like a promise

black love sounds a promise

healthcare sounds like a promise

hearing you sounds like a promise

loving you sounds like a promise

time with the earth sounds like a promise

evolving perspective sounds like a promise

ancestors sound like a promise

the orisha are a promise

our community is a promise

kinship is a promise

being celebrated while you can still enjoy it sounds like a promise

my truth reflected back to me with love sounds like a promise

saying yes and no sounds like a promise

the broadness of my vision sounds like a promise

defiance sounds like a promise

worth keeping

“I love the word survival, it always sounds to me like a promise.  It makes me wonder sometimes though, how do I define the shape of my impact upon this earth?” –

reflection cut from an early draft of “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger” by Audre Lorde (Audre Lorde Papers, Spelman College Archive)

Shape of My Impact Conversation 

Wednesday Sept, 17th 7pm-9pm EDT

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/brilliance-remastered-broadcast-the-shape-of-my-impact-tickets-13111269159

This Back to School Brilliance Remastered Webinar is an opportunity for community accountable scholars to support each other and access resources designed to helps us all activate our brilliance in collaboration with the communities we love. This discussion will center on Brilliance Remastered founder Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s article on survival and the academic industrial complex entitled “The Shape of My Impact” and published at The Feminist Wire in October 2012.  “The Shape of My Impact” has circulated over the past two years and has resonated with many community accountable scholars.   Recently, several community accountable scholars have reached out about a space to discuss the issues that the article raises.    This is that space!

The article is available here:  http://thefeministwire.com/2012/10/the-shape-of-my-impact/

Come join online or via phone to talk about how draw on the insights of earlier generations of community accountable scholars to navigate the academic industrial complex and how to support each other as we deal with the realities of the neoliberalization of the university.   This dialogue will be facilitated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and is the perfect place for anyone who is interested in building subversive intellectual community and talking about strategies for living the dream.  Register for free or with a donation at eventbrite here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/brilliance-remastered-broadcast-the-shape-of-my-impact-tickets-13111269159

Greetings loved ones!
It’s already that time when the intellectual cycle restarts us!  Congratulations to all of you starting new scholastic adventures, re-engaging multi-year degree expectations, sending little ones off to school, teaching at all levels or navigating your first fall without structured educational space!  I am so excited for you and for what this season of your brilliance means for ALL OF US.  In celebration,  I want to offer three resources for your continued brillliance:

1.  Black Feminist Breathing!

This summer more than a thousand people participated in a digital Black Feminist Breathing Chorus with guided medtations and beautiful images that I designed in honor of the brilliant Black ancestors who have made my intellectual practice of Black Feminist Love Evangelism possible!

I recently made ALL THE MEDITATIONS available as downloads so they can motivate you through the hard moments and help you celebrate the legacy of brilliance that lifts us all up!

Donations of $25-100 give you eternal access to the streaming meditations on the site and donations of 101 or more give you access to streaming AND downloads of the meditations as audio files.  Sustainers of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind are already using the meditations in their classrooms and for their ongoing community work!  Shout out to the Black Girl Project who used our Anna Julia Cooper meditation at their recent board retreat!

If you would like to get eternal access to the meditations streaming and downloaded to use for your personal upliftment or to share with your organization or students you can become a monthly sustainer of the Eternal Summer of Black Feminist Mind at a level that feels generously sustainable to you.

2. Brilliance Remastered One-on-One Reboots!

Whether you want to start one-on-one coaching for this semester with me or you just want advice on taking one aspect of your community accountable intellectual work to the next level, now is a great time to schedule a phone consultation with me!

Phone consultations about one-on-one Brilliance Remastered coaching, joining a coaching cohort or writing feedback are $25 for 30 minutes.

Phone consultations or video conference sessions for specific advice about applications, programs, projects, next steps, campus activism etc. are $50 for 1-hour.  (During Fall 2014 I will be conducting special online office hours on Wednesdays 10am-2pm EST free for existing participants and at the regular hour or half hourly rates for new folks!)

All phone consultations offer concrete next steps and all fees go directly to Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.

3. Bright Thunder Brain Trust Network

And if you just want to be the first to know about upcoming webinars and resources for community accountable intellectuals sign up for the email list!

To be added to the Brilliance Remastered network list (aka Bright Thunder Brain Trust) sign up below (I will never send more than 4 emails a month):