Written Women: The Thunder, Perfect Mind

Written Women is a monthly writers salon at Cordelia, inviting you to respond to poems, myths, and stories written by and about women.

Each month, we'll read and discuss a different text to inspire our own free-write session, drawing from women's stories of power, madness, sensuality, tragedy, queerness, and insubordination. Time will be set aside at the end of each meetup for folks to share excerpts of what they've written.

This November, we’ll read The Thunder, Perfect Mind, a Coptic poem from the 4th century, written in the first person in the voice of a divine feminine authority.

Considering introductory analysis from translators and historians who theorize about the work's (unknown) authorship and its place among Gnostic texts, we'll explore the work's winding contradictions as its speaker asserts herself as the whore and the holy one, knowledge and ignorance, the great and the disgraced.

Embracing the living, breathing, ever-shifting paradox of she who is godless, and the one whose God is great, we'll write our own poems which play with our power to state exactly who we are: in all our complexity, contradiction, and truth.

Written Women is led by poet, movement artist and facilitator Katya Borkov. You can learn more about her work at www.everythingspills.studio, or on instagram @everything.spills

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.