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 THE GHOSTS WE CARRY 

In our Humanity. 

A 5-week writing salon with MaryBeth Bonfiglio
July 15- August 25, 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 because all the yous -  are just… heavy. 

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. 

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. 

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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 of the suffering that also lives, and still, the gratitude floods. And the memories of the lives of the ghosts — and the spectrum that bubbles up. 

 

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. 

 

And somehow, in this world that is moving faster and faster toward the mechanical, the algorithmic, the artificial — we are still here.

 

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

And if we want, we can touch each other with our words. We can form words. We can write. 

Still hauntingly, beautifully, inconveniently human. We can write, real words, in a very real time. 

 

See? The ghosts also remember a time before the before, before this time and even before that.

 

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?

This salon is for that.

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WHAT TO EXPECT 

5 Live Salon Sessions 

all sessions recorded, so you never miss a moment

3 co-writing sessions 

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


Days:

  • Session 1: The Intention + Noticing July 15 7pm ET
  • Session 2: The Haunting July 22 7pm ET
  • Session 3: The Healing July 29 7pm ET
  • Session 4: The Human-ness August 5 7pm ET
  • Session 5: The Weight That Goes in the Ground August 12 7pm ET

Co-writing Dates:

  • July 24 Noon ET
  • July 31 Noon ET
  • August 17 Noon ET 

You’ll leave with pages that matter, words that burn, spells you didn’t know you carried. 

Feel free to write 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.


Let’s not think of this writing as 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. 

This isn’t a polish to publish 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. 

 

 

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 — comes from that.

I have been gathering people to write together for a decade. Not to teach them how to write. To 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