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CHTHONIC LUST

scorpio season underworld salon

 A 5-Week Writing Salon with MaryBeth Bonfiglio
October 21 – November 11, 2026

We are not looking towards the light.
There is no ascension here.
We are not rising up and we don’t care.
Our queen is the underworld. And we are going to meet her down there.

 

We are entering the wet and dark place, the place where the head is of no use, and the body reigns, and Eros demands.


We are in the gut space, the inner spine, the low hot simmering hum beneath the navel that has its own language of desire. That place that has been trying to burn through you, speak through you, but you keep giving the upward space, you keep giving your head/ mind space the microphone.


Let’s try something else. Let’s amplify the yearning, the burning, the pounding of what goes on below.
In descent, we know who we are and we find out who actually wants us, while we discover our own Wants.
We experience how we want it. How we give the gift of wanting. And how to become the wanting in the darkness.

JOIN US

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So many glorious things grow in the darkness. Ghost Pipe. Babies, the womb is the underworld. Mushrooms and yeast grow rapidly without light, but also cave spiders, anglerfish, vampire squid, bats, owls, and Tasmanian devils to name a few. So many flowers open up in the dark; Bella di Notte, Angel’s Trumpet, Queen of the Night, Moonflower. Only the night dwellers can see their bloom.


It is in the ancestral, lineage held soil, the sensual chthonic that we become. 


We do not become in the light, we become in the places we can no longer see. The places the dead return to, to create wet, fecund and fertile beingness, for us. 

This is the home of our lust, our sex,  our pleasure chest, or cave of eroticism, our wanton needs and desires.

The chthonic is where death lives, and so of course it’s where sex lives.

 It pulls us down and asks us to die and make love.

This is a salon about that hunger; it is the season to allow yourself to die and make love. 

 

What love affairs took you under and didn't hand you a map back?

 

The ones that lived below language — in a look, in a held wrist, in the specific dark of a room you can still smell. The ones you're not supposed to talk about at dinner. We're going to talk about them. We're going to write from the center of the body outward instead of the head down — from the organs that create, that bleed, that ache, that remember. We are moving out of the mind and into the pelvis, the womb, the low belly, the parts of you that hold their own unwritten testimony.

 

We come from people who understood that lust and grief and the sacred were never separate rooms. Only one house, with a door on the floor, always inviting us to enter. We get to descend. 

 

This writing salon is for the descent. For the times we fell; in love, in lust, in desire, when the dark took us by the throat and massaged the bottoms of our feet. This writing salon is where we braid together what grows in the dark, what dies in our bodies, and the seeds of sex that long to be planted way below the soil’s edge.
 

WHAT TO EXPECT 

This Salon Runs From October 21 – November 11, 2026

5 Live Salon Sessions 

Wednesdays (times vary; see dates for details)
all sessions recorded, so you never miss a moment

3 co-writing sessions 

(dates selected after registration ends; 45-minutes each)

held between salon weeks for those who want to keep the thread going

A private shared community space

to write, to read, to witness each other

Come as you are — lusty, dark, a little ruined by love, but with a deep hope for what grows in the sacred underworld of our lives.

JOIN US

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT IS THIS?

Chthonic Lust; an underworld salon  is a five-week writing gathering — an intimate online space where we write into what wants us,  what feels for us, and what it means to be dark and sensual. What is meant to be dying and birthing within the womb of darkness.

 

Let’s not think of this writing as writing to perform (both sex and death should not be performed). 

We will be writing to practice, to process, to express how we feel, how our ghosts feels, how our human self feels. What we see. What wants to be seen. What takes shape. When we give our bodies time to shape something.  

This isn’t a polish-for-publishing workshop (unless we want to and I will 100% make a cute zine for us all, more on that later). It’s a salon! We come to think and talk and be weird and plant ideas and share ourselves and of course write. We get to be vulnerable, sexy, dark. 

We will be writing to remember. To feel. 

 

Honestly, it’s all a mystery. I am here to hold it. We all are.


Each week we gather live in our shared classroom space. We invoke the elementals and the muses. We move to music — cameras off, in the privacy of our own bodies — to shake loose what’s stuck in the fascia, to honor the inner creative and ancestral web that lives in us. And then we write. And we listen. And we talk. And we sit with it together.

 

 

We won’t be obsessing over craft or trauma dumping or fixing anything. 

We are going to show up in something older than all that.

I like to think of it as a connective creation. Connective creative tissues. 

It’s us around the fire, sharing ideas, thoughts, senses. 

 

THIS IS ALSO MAGIC.

Writing is magic and we do it together. 

THE ARC

Click below to expand on each session's theme.

THIS IS FOR YOU IF...

You are a writer or you used to be, or you want to be, or you’re not sure what you are but words have always been how you make sense of things. This is for all levels of “writer”. 

You are tired of writing alone. You are just plain tired. You need some creative holding. And you like being weird and creative with others. 

You have things inside you that haven’t found their form yet. But you know you want to get something out. And community support is the medicine. 

You want to write about the real things — loss, love, lineage, the body, the dead, the living, the mess of being here, the plants, the river, the trees. And you want to be able to make a mess of it, and still be expressed and still feel at home. 

You want to be in a room (even a virtual one) with other people who also want to show up, be together, support the writing, support the poetics of this moment. 

(WE NEED TO BE WRITING THESE MOMENTS)

You don’t need to have written anything before. You don’t need to share anything you write. You can write like nobody will ever read it. You just need to show up. Let the rest follow. 

THIS IS NOT FOR YOU IF...

You’re looking for line edits and craft feedback.

You want a structured writing course with assignments and grades.

You’re not ready to go somewhere real on the page or at least be there for others who go deeply real.

COST

3 tier sliding scale pricing for accessibility
Please be honest about what you are truly able to afford. If you are resourced, please redistribute fairly so I can continue to show up and facilitate and others can continue to participate. Tier 3 is basically the scholarship cost, so choose accordingly. Thank you. 

Tier 1:

$400

I am able to give more and want to make space for others who cannot and make sure our facilitator gets paid too
TIER 1 | REGISTER

Tier 2:

$300

I can contribute at this level and want to support the work and others who cannot afford this tier

TIER 2 | REGISTER

Tier 3:

$200

I am resourced enough to participate and this feels right for me


TIER 3 | REGISTER

 

All tiers receive the exact same experience. No questions asked.

ABOUT MARYBETH

I am a writer. That is the first thing. Everything else — the ancestral work, the Sicily immersions, the sacred containers I hold — all comes from my curiosity and magic I find with the writing arts.

I have been gathering people to write together for a decade. I do not teach people how to write. I just remind them that they already know. That the stories are already inside them. That the act of putting words on a page in the company of others is one of the oldest forms of healing we have. The first published writer was a woman named Eduhuanna and she was writing poetry to cast magic and worship the goddess. 

I write at the intersections  of the seen and unseen, the longed for and the lost, the delicious and the difficult. I believe words are ancestral. I believe your ghosts have things to say. I believe writing is how we stay human. Art making is humanity. 

Come write with me/us. 

We are a beautiful fierce group of beings. 

“Write like you make love.”

— MaryBeth Bonfiglio