General 2 — Bella Figura

The Liminal Season:

Connecting With Ancestral Ghosts

“The dead are invisible. They are not absent.”

— Saint Augustine

Autumn is the perfect season to begin the project you’ve been wanting to start for years—gathering your family stories and making connection to your ancestors a routine, everyday habit. With days shifting from light to dark, warm to cool, with Halloween, All Souls Day, and Día de Muertos, it’s the season with a long tradition of honoring and connecting with the dead.

When we connect to our ancestry—whether through cultivating and writing our family stories, building small everyday altars, being the stewards of ancestral objects, or whether through prayer, art or cooking—we enrich our daily lives. We move past the mundane tasks of living and become unified with the timeless. We become part of something greater than ourselves. In this is a bit of liberation from the worldly, as well as a deepening. Life becomes imbued with more meaning, we draw closer to the mystical, and, with the strength of our ancestors at our side, the small things that in the past rocked our little personal boats no longer toss and turn us.

“After our session, I experienced such an onslaught of emotions. You did a fantastic job. You have the ideal amount of passion, sincerity and finesse to guide and to encourage your students. It was amazing how a group of 'strangers' could share the most intimate of thoughts and feelings, but we really are not strangers, just kindred souls. It was a wonderful and invigorating experience! Honestly, Dolores, thank you so very much. I am so very happy that I stepped out of my comfort zone to experience this workshop with you.” —Christina Pedota Polidore, participant in “Tell the Story of Your Ancestors” workshop

If you’re interested in diving into this liminal season, the season where we wait between the warmth departing and the cold entering, where the veil between the living and the dead lifts, briefly, as the earth gets ready for quiet and stillness, much like the dead themselves, then I’d love for you to join me on October 19th for a cozy Saturday morning meet up.

This workshop is a way to slow down and anchor into autumn by connecting with your ancestors and cultural roots through stories, writing, prayer, art and cooking. We’ll spend two hours together, talking about various ways to cultivate a relationship with those who came before you.

liminal

adjective

lim·i·nal ˈli-mə-nᵊl

:of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition : in-between, transitional

… in the liminal state between life and death....

How to write about ancestors

We’ll talk about how to capture legacy stories—the stories about people you love & knew, and which you want to ensure future generations are intimate with. We’ll also talk about how to capture the essence of stories you’ve heard about ancestors you didn’t know, & how to make these stories real to descendants.
We’ll talk about how to handle the gaps—how to fill them in with research, but also how to embrace them. We’ll talk about using story tidbits, or lack thereof, to create your family’s own personal folklore that can endure for generations.
How to write your own story into the greater narrative

We’ll talk about exploring your own life to bring your story into the present & draw connections between past generations & the current one. We’ll focus on narrative, craft, content & style.
Practical Ways to Honor Your Ancestors

We’ll talk about altars, how to create and tend to them, ways to honor your ancestors aside from writing, like the use of objects, prayer and ritual.
We'll touch on paying attention to dreams, signs and patron saints to connect to those you've lost.
The Kitchen as Connection

We'll explore how to use the kitchen, cooking, ingredients and recipes as a way of connecting to your ancestry and those who came before you. We'll talk about the kitchen as a meditative space.
We'll discuss how to cultivate an ancestral kitchen, using ingredients your ancestors would've used to step into the long line of those who came before and increase the nutritional value and flavor of what you cook.

We’ll also briefly touch on:

How to write well—tips, tricks, and considerations for powerful prose to improve your writing not only in this project, but in every aspect of your life.

Approaches to narrative: How to choose the structure for your story. Do you want to write from one person’s perspective? Many people? Do you want to start at the beginning of a life, or the end?
Approaches to research: How to fill in the gaps with research & flesh out your narrative. How to gather stories from those still living & learn things you never knew.

**Please note: Spots are limited for this workshop. Enrollment will be honored on a first come, first serve basis.

Join Now

If you don’t honor your ancestors, who will?

What’s Included:

One two-hour live session, held over Zoom.

Recordings available after the workshop.

Participants will also receive three thoughtfully made digital PDF booklets, complete with inspiring photography and bursting with useful information:

A copy of my “Tell the Story of Your Ancestors” digital PDF, which includes writing assignments, exercises and prompts to get you started on writing your family stories from a fresh perspective. It also includes a curated collection of writing examples to demonstrate how other writers have written about their families, and guidance on ways to organize your writing, along with an overview of how to write well.

My 30-page digital PDF booklet, “Ten Ways to Honor Your Ancestors,” which includes ten practical ways that require no purchases or consumerism to honor those who came before you.

And finally, a third digital PDF booklet, “The Ancestral Kitchen,” giving an overview of ancestral ingredients—the top ones I use, how to use them, and how to use them to connect to your ancestral roots.