Love Against Empire

“May we love in ways that devastingly disrupt state violence.” ~Gabes Torres

What does Love want in this moment? What work does it do? What does it serve? What are Love’s implications for navigating the path ahead?

This V-Day we gather these questions in our cauldron. Not as a Hallmark event, but one that allows Love to show up with both teeth and tenderness.

Love Against Empire is a two-hour creative/writing playshop is a generative space to write with/in/as Love as refusal, love as vision, Love as something that composts Empire and keeps moving even when Power prefers it frozen.

We’re living inside systems and stories that punish care, criminalize kinship, and try to starve us of primary satisfactions while selling us secondary satisfactions: consumption, image, spectacle, division. Love asks for something different.

Together we’ll write from the body and heart to practice love as a liberatory force—not a feeling but a directional discipline that survives hostile conditions and builds the soil of the new. We’ll write jn fragments, lists, love letters—holding grief, rage, tenderness, and devotion without turning them into saccharine performance.

Through short ecosomatic grounding, guided prompts, and collective weaving, we’ll practice writing with love: in particular, with love as refusal, as power, as kinship.

Think of it as a temporary altar for rejoining the animate web of life, to feel what’s alive, with words as one tool/toy.

Come whether you write all the time or haven’t in years; come exhausted, yearning, or committed. There’s no performance here—We’re just practicing being alive and human together and getting curious about what Love might mean or want to do in this moment of collective initiation. And to remember that perhaps love, when lived, can be dangerous in all the right ways.

Come as you are; bring a pen, your body, your truths, and open to whatever words might be ready to arrive.

If this feels like something that could be supportive of staying bouyed in this time of Trouble, you’re welcome to come surface words and sparks with us.

REGISTER HERE, or VENMO: RyanVanLenning with the note “Love Against Empire” and a good email for zoom link.