Fat Joy

A writing workshop for fat folks, exploring how to find joy in an anti-fat world.

Living as a fat person in today’s world comes with huge challenges. Diet culture and anti-fatness show up in all aspects of our lives, such as lunchrooms, medical appointments, and relationships. Connecting to joy, pleasure, and fat positivity can feel impossible. 

In this workshop, we’ll use writing to gently explore some of the harms, biases, and oppressions we’ve experienced while living in a world that marginalizes fat bodies. And then write ourselves deeply into resilience, courage, community, and audacity — claiming and celebrating our fat joy.

This is a workshop designed for people who experience discrimination and barriers due to their size. Acknowledging that no system of labels is going to reflect every person’s experience, this workshop is for people who are mid fat, large fat, and superfat/infinifat — for those of us who frequently face barriers to access healthcare or public seating, experience workplace discrimination, or can only purchase clothing in a plus-size store or online.

Between classes, we’ll provide fat-positive resources to enhance your journey and inspire your writing.

Before completing your registration, you’ll have a short phone/zoom chat with Sophia so she can answer any of your questions and confirm this feels like the right workshop for you.

Here’s how it works:

In each session, we’ll draw inspiration from writers, poets, singers, artists, and activists in the fat liberation space and gain insights and ideas that we can bring into our writing.

We’ll be writing from our own lived experience using writing prompts, mindfulness exercises, and sensory connection to travel inward.

We’ll be sharing lots of what we write and giving each other encouraging feedback to keep moving us forward. Our goal is to cultivate joy and compassion for ourselves and our bodies, inviting a deeper wisdom to connect us to our creative voices.

Is this class right for you?

We approach this material from an anti-diet culture, anti-racist, disability justice perspective. That means that this workshop isn’t about how to change our bodies or idealize the “perfect body,” but instead is an invitation to witness and acknowledge our bodies as they are now.

People we’ve learned from and are inspired by are Sonya Renee Taylor, Virgie Tovar, and Aubrey Gordon.

Here are our guiding principles:

• We can write about our own lived experience, which may include intentional weight loss, witnessing our bodies age and change, or grappling with societal expectations and beauty standards set by diet culture, but we avoid content that implies that living in a fat body is wrong.

• We don’t share writing that assumes that there are only two genders or that heterosexuality is the norm. We recognize that gender and sexuality are complex and we welcome all expressions of that.

• We welcome work that challenges the messages of oppressive systems, which means that we encourage participants to be curious and examine how diet culture, racism, ableism, ageism, and other biases impacts our bodies and our lives.

• We will let go of all ideas about what a “good” or “bad” body is, and instead acknowledge and appreciate our body’s ability to carry us through the world.

• We’ll give content warnings for descriptions of food and eating, to show care for those participants with eating disorders or other sensitivities.

• As a writing facilitator, I’m not a therapist. When we draw our attention to our bodies, we can find trauma, judgment, and past wounds. I’ll do my best to make a safe-as-possible space in this workshop, but writing can be confronting, and a group writing experience won’t be the right tool to process deep trauma.