WOW First Sunday welcomes Dawn Brockett
Sunday, January 8, 2023
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
via Zoom
Creating Space For the Bounty of the New Year
Whether you ambitiously set detailed New Year’s resolutions or actively avoid the practice, the changing of the calendar year is a natural time to check in with where you find yourself on your journey—what is working, what is not, what you’d like more of, less of, none of—what you’d like to change in order to move closer to where you want to be.
Change requires movement, and movement requires space.
“Creating and maintaining space is the answer: space and a clear distinction between what is me and what is not, between what I crave and what I must do to name and satisfy the need that has learned to mask itself with propriety and deprivation.”
—Dawn Brockett, Unrestricted: How I Stepped Off the Tightrope, Learned to Say No, and Silenced Anorexia
I’d like you to begin with this question, “What do I need, in order to have the freedom to create and change?”
Please join me and the Wide Open Writing community to learn more about how to make space for yourself this year.
About Dawn Brockett
Dawn Brockett is a classically trained chef, college professor, advisor to clinical trials in anorexia, and COO of a medical society. She is a master yoga instructor and holds an honors degree in Philosophy from Westminster College, a graduate certificate in French Language and Literature from the Université de Paris—Sorbonne, an advanced graduate certificate in French Literature and Poetry from L’Institut de Touraine, and a graduate certificate in Negotiation & Peace Studies and Master of Public Policy & Administration degree from Boise State University.
Dawn’s first full-length book, Unrestricted: How I Stepped Off the Tightrope, Learned to Say No, and Silenced Anorexia, published by Harridan and Strumpet, is scheduled to launch on March 7, 2023. She was also published alongside many women’s powerful stories in What Doesn’t Kill Her: Women’s Stories of Resilience.
Dawn lives in Idaho, where mountains of exceptional height, chocolate of profound depth, and conversations of extraordinary length reliably lure her from her writing chair. You can find her at dawnbrockett.com.
Read more and register via Eventbrite
About Unrestricted
In Unrestricted: How I Stepped Off the Tightrope, Learned to Say No, and Silenced Anorexia (release date: March 7, 2023), Dawn Brockett challenges the pervasive belief that anorexia is compelled by a desire to control. Given the limited progress medicine has made in treating anorexia, the deadliest of all mental health disorders, she issues a call to action to change the way anorexia and anorectics are viewed and treated through the lens of her own successful battle against the disease.
She proposes that anorexia is triggered by a lack of the space a young woman needs to fully individuate— to become who she chooses to be without being controlled by others. The anorectic is not compelled by a desire to control the world or to be thin. She is compelled to disappear, shrinking to the space that she feels she is allowed to take up in her life, the size of which is dictated by others’ demands and expectations.
At once heart wrenching, heartwarming, and hopeful, this is the story of how one woman stopped disappearing, started listening to her own voice, and finally claimed her rightful place in the world.
Read more and register via Eventbrite
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