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 THE GHOSTS WE CARRY 

In our Humanity. 

A 5-week writing salon with MaryBeth Bonfiglio
July 15- August 14, 2026

You carry them.
I carry them.
We all carry them.

 

The ones who came before you and those who came before them and those that were born from salt and rocks and leftover minerals from lava. We carry stories, sounds, textures, flavors. 

The versions of yourself you’ve had to leave behind or that you keep dragging alongside you, wishing you had better luggage with smoother wheels or someone to help you with the weight.

The loves that didn’t survive are in there, too,  the words that never got said when you really wanted to say them but never felt safe or seen. Or had the language. Or enough time.

The grief that sits unfinished, undigested in your gut, from your mother and her mother, and who else knows who. But it’s stuck there. Stagnant. Inflamed. Needing digestion.

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That beautiful joy that flickers up sometimes, surprising you, remembering you are grateful to be here and alive. And within that joy the remembering. The gratitude floods. Along side the rising tide of the suffering. And the memories of the lives of the ghosts — all kinds that made you -- and the spectrum that bubbles up. Turns up. There are so many. We are nesting cups.

 

You carry all that and more in your body — in your webby fascia with spiders tickling you from the inside, your breath, your slow downbeat of a pause before you speak, act, choose.  

We carry all that and the endless threads of possibilities. This is our human gift. To hold all that is and also weave webs of something entirely new.

 

Somehow, in this world that is moving faster and faster toward the mechanical, the algorithmic, the artificial — we are still here. We still have real words and real bodies they live within.

 

Hi. We are here. In flesh. In blood. In story. In our humanity. 

 

When time stood still and we held hands for hours and we watched the sun go down. Who held whose hand? Where was that sunset? What was our humanity then? And now? What was the humanity of the ghosts who brought us here? What did they see? What do we notice about them in the iris of our eyes? What is the whisper that keeps us at night, wanting us to get out of bed and write?

This salon is for that.

WHAT TO EXPECT 

This Salon Runs From July 15- August 14, 2026

5 Live Salon Sessions 

Wednesdays at 7pm ET
all sessions recorded, so you never miss a moment

3 co-writing sessions 

Select Fridays at Noon ET
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

You'll leave with...

...pages that matter, words that burn, spells you didn’t know you carried. 

...lists, letters, incantations, poems, prose, weird wild things that will bring beauty and truth to your world. 

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WHAT IS THIS?

The Ghosts We Carry: In Our Humanity is a five-week writing salon — an intimate online gathering where we write into what haunts us, what heals us, and what it means to be alive in a body, in relationship, in this particular broken and beautiful moment.


We are not doing this writing to perform. 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. 

We won't polish up so we can publish in this workshop (unless we want to and I will 100% make a cute zine for us all, more later on that). It’s a salon! We come to think and talk and be weird and plant ideas and share ourselves and of course write. 

We will be writing to remember. To feel. To find the words for what we’ve been carrying. Or maybe words our GGGGGrandmother has been clamping down on, waiting for them to come through you. 


Honestly, it’s all a mystery. 


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. 

We will use our body to move the way it longs to (always a spell to begin a salon with). 

We'll share stories, take time to write, and contemplate the mysteries of the ghosts we carry.

 

 

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:

$250

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

TIER 2 | REGISTER

Tier 3:

$150

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. 

“The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.”

— Flannery O’Connor