In The Style of our SELF || SISTORIES x Mariah M. is proud to present An Excavation of Being: Digging for Story in the Fragments, facilitated by Hess Love.
About this workshop: Archaeologists don’t start with answers, they start with fragments. This workshop invites you to do the same. Through writing, we’ll learn how to hold what’s been buried, broken, or left behind, and still make meaning. We’ll look at “the story behind that” and excavate the pieces of ourselves like sacred sites: layered, interrupted, worthy of being carefully uncovered.
About the steward, Hess Love: Hess is a hoodoo-mother-poet, playwright, ethnographer, Master Naturalist, Watershed Steward, Woodlands Steward, & apprentice hunter who carries Afro-Chesapeake tradition at the heart of my work. The expanse of their work rekindles a deep sense of being & creativity. It allows their rootedness -as a keeper of the AfroChesapeake experience- to serve as a model.
They use the medicine of wonder & tenderness toward the suppressed, the fragmented, and the unknown, and encourage others to reclaim their stories, commit to wisdom, reintegrate themselves into the wild, and learn how to become a symbiont with their ancestors, adored ones, and the more-than-human world. Hess' work moves between whimsy and solemnity, contemplating the present world alongside the layered realities of the past, future, and now.
In community and creative ventures, Hess is the founder of the Chesapeake Conjure Society (the first Hoodoo Society). I hold a Master of Arts in Playwriting, & a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I’m also a Black burial ground advocate, ritualist, writer, an independent scholar, folklorist with a concentration on Hoodoo & Black Atlantic Religion in the Chesapeake Bay region, and Curator of Black Americana Religion & Spirituality (Folk Belief) for African American Folklorist Mag This workshop is part of In The Style of Liberation 2025 cultural programming block housed at SISTORIES Literary.
Register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/CczS5sCqRy-ivzr_RanE_g#/registration