I would love to introduce you to our newest facilitator, Nina Willow.
Nina, in a flowy white top in front of the ocean. Nina identifies as a later middle-aged white femme. She has chunky blue glasses, a tattoo on her forearm, and a big easy smile.
Sometimes things just work.
This spring our team hit a low. Work was coming in fast and we were all bogged down by life stuff. We didn’t have the energy to meet the world at our door, even though the world kept knocking.
I could hear the drain in our voices in team meetings. Our momentum was somewhere, our love for the work was intact, but it felt harder to find, buried under layers of fog and exhaustion.
I could tell we needed to bring in another facilitator, but the tremendous work of a hire didn’t fit into this equation. I couldn’t see a way out of the haze.
Meanwhile, over in Seattle, something else was happening.
A very long-time, beloved community member (who I’d always secretly thought would be an amazing writing coach) was slipping into a new kind of life.
Nina had traded her intense, full-time work as a physician for something part-time and much roomier. Her kids moved out. She had a growing sense of space, and she wanted to fill that space with creativity, community, and writing.
To say that Nina has always been a fan of Firefly would be a vast understatement.
She calls this her creative home. She has been doing programs with us for 15 years, flying to Ontario any time she can. A few years ago, she got a Firefly tattoo, to forever remember the impact of this community on her life.
As soon as we started to talk about her joining us, it was like all the lights snapping on in a stadium.
Her skills aligned perfectly. The scheduling worked, despite the time difference. She was even able to join us at the last minute for our annual Team Day last week so that we could start this journey all together, right where all this started, in a living room in Toronto with fuzzy orange blankets and big mugs of warm drinks.
So, let me introduce you to Nina Willow, the newest member of the Firefly team.
Nina is a queer physician, artist, mother, writer and lover of everything tender and true.
In her doctor-life, Nina’s vision has always been about community. She pushes for justice, compassion, and inclusivity to her work, and brings a deep understanding of anti-oppression practices, and all the ways the medical system can leave people out.
She’s run retreats for healthcare workers in empathic listening, critical illness conversations, rupture and repair, self-compassion, trauma, and much more.
She brings all that to us, along with her shining heart, and her electric love of everything the written word can do.
Nina deeply understands the fear so many of us feel around writing.
In her first year of college she was placed in a remedial writing program, and says she went to med school partly so that she would never need to write again.
Years later, she stumbled into an expressive writing program for healthcare workers while she was on a journey of learning how to live with her own clinical depression. She was hooked, and soon after, she found Firefly.
In Firefly retreats and workshops over the years, she has written her way through divorce, coming out, the pandemic, dating, mental health challenges, single parenting, and much more.
Here are a few of the things she is excited to bring to us when she’s done her training:
Making spaces specifically for LGBTQIA+ community.
Incorporating the deep work she’s done about self-compassion into all the groups she gathers.
Creating programming for people experiencing mental health struggles.
Expanding her own writing practice with the inspiration of everyone here.
If you want to work with Nina this summer, you sure can.
She’ll be co-leading Begin Here with Sophia on Monday evenings. Later in the summer, she’ll start her own session of Keep Your Pen Moving on Tuesday evenings. She’ll also do some of our Morning Coffee Sessions starting this summer.
And, if you’re a member of Fireside Community for Writers, (registration is open until Friday!) she’ll be organizing a special gathering for LGBTQIA+ members to celebrate their stories, which she’s calling a “gayla.” (Come on!)
And of course, here are some ways to work with all of us…
Summer Workshops are here
We have a sweet line-up of small group workshops this summer! You can work with our newest facilitator Nina in Keep Your Pen Moving, which she’s solo-piloting later in the season.
Because of popular demand, we opened a second session of Begin Here, run by Asifa.
We also have room in Romantasy, Focus and Flow, The Fiction Workshop, Brief Bursts, and more.
There are 3 more days to join “Fireside Community for Writers”
Fireside Community for Writers is where we bring people together for a no-pressure, steady stream of inspiration, structure and gatherings. We open registration 3 times a year and this is one of those times.
You can see me awkwardly explaining it here.
You can get all the details and sign up here.
Push Week is coming right up.
Push Week is a 5-day program for anyone looking to give their writing a deep infusion of energy and forward motion.
We’ll pack writing sessions into the five days, including daily morning intention setting sessions, co-writing through the days, mini workshops in the evening, and a big open mic at the end.
A poem for your heart
I’ve been feeling a lot of soul these days, but, because I’m a person, I’ve been struggling to out that into words.
W.S. Merwin is a poet I go to in those moments, because he knows how to have that struggle out loud.
Here’s to growing, to change, to getting help when we need it.
Here’s to saying yes to the things that light us up like stadiums, and believing that those things exist, even when we’re deep in fog.
Here’s to Nina! If you want to welcome her yourself, you can reach her at nina@fireflycreativewriting.com, and say whatever you want to say to warm her path into this new role.
In it with you,
