bookbear express in person
workshops!
Serena Stevens, Kylie, 2019
Hi! As you may or may not know, I’ve been hosting in-person workshops with my friend Rishi. We did two experimental prototypes in March and April, one in SF and one in New York. They were really fun!
Turns out, Bookbear Express subscribers are really awesome. I have somehow managed to assemble one of the greatest groups of cool people on the internet. Every time I get these people together, it goes great. People meet each other and build friendships and find value in talking about things that they may not have space for in their normal day to day lives. I have officially decided this should be A Thing.
Our workshop series is called Define the Relationship because relationship takes are ubiquitous in our culture but friendships are vastly under-explored. We see our friends every week, maybe even multiple times a week, and our longest-running friendships often outlast romantic partnerships, but we rarely make time to explicitly talk about how our friendships can be better. That’s what Rishi and I are trying to make space for.
We’re going to do a third workshop that’s happening in San Francisco on May 18th. This one will be the longest yet: 10 AM to 5 PM, with lunch provided and a break halfway in between.
The topic is “becoming comfortable with conflict.” This will be a space to explore your personal relationship with conflict, to experiment with initiating and receiving conversations that invoke conflict, and learning together about how conflict brings us in better relationship
It will also be a place to discuss communication, friendships, relationships of all kinds, but also a community building space to meet like-minded folks willing to go into the deeper intricacies of how we relate to one another.
You should walk away with a deeper sense of how you want to relate to conflict, perhaps some accountability on specific conversations you want to have, and (if we do our jobs) a friend or three who’s walking the same path.
What to expect:
Sharing in conversation, 1:1, small groups, sharing with a larger group
Some feedback and role modeling from us on how we relate to conflict
The opportunity to role play and explore conflict that feels alive for us
Getting out of our heads and moving our bodies
Lunch!
Some time indoors and some time in the sun (weather permitting)
This is first-come first serve, so you don’t have to apply, you can just sign up here. The workshop costs $300 but if you need financial aid you can email us at friendshipindustrialcomplex@gmail.com.
If you can’t come to this one but want to come to the next one, give us your email here. We’re likely doing a New York workshop in June. Note: For both this and future workshops, if you have a space for 15-18 people and are willing to offer it, we will comp your participation as a show of gratitude!
Here are some testimonials:
I think you two did a great job of creating an open comfortable genuine environment to share and get vulnerable that is thoughtful and unpretentious. It felt very human! Thanks
I really appreciated how thoughtfully this event was organized, from giving people safe spaces to share their thoughts and conflicts that they were going through, to organically driving conversation. It’s made me more reflective on my own friendships and what types of conversations I want to have.
Rishi and Ava created a unique, intimate container to explore all the difficulties that come with conflict and close friendship. They strike exactly the right balance of encouraging and challenging you to help you understand some of your growth edges in how you relate to others. Their workshop has given me several moments of connection and insight that I feel excited to bring into my existing friendships.
This workshop provided a safe and nurturing space for me to work through friendship conflicts that have been on my mind lately. Love the intimate format, thoughtfulness of everyone participating, and deeply caring way that Ava and Rishi facilitated it.
Backstory:
Rishi was the one who originally approached me with the idea of doing a workshop for readers of Bookbear Express (well, he proposed “Avacamp,” but I think he could tell I wasn’t really ready for that). I had never worked with him before, but we’ve been friends for a long time.
We brainstormed different subjects, including romantic relationships, self-employment, life transitions (I’m big into Saturn returns). But ultimately we settled on friendship, because friendship is what the two of us talk about together the most. “Friendship” is the topic I want to focus on in Bookbear Express this year. Some of my own questions about friendship:
My friends are my number one source of happiness. Is that true of other people?
Why have I chosen the people I’ve chosen?
How do we deal with friendship breakups?
I want to live near my friends. How do I make that happen, or how do I keep them near me if we’re already living in the same city?
What will change when we all have children?
How do I balance the existing ties in my life with meeting new people?
How do I have better conversations with my friends? How do I open up more and encourage them to open up more?
What do I do when I think that my friend resents me, or is mad at me, or doesn’t want to be friends anymore, or is secretly in love with me, but won’t say it explicitly?
We knew that we wanted to discuss these things, but we didn’t know what format it took. We ended up doing two prototype workshops.
Our first workshop was in San Francisco. There were 10 people including Rishi and me, and we had slightly over 100 people apply. We chose people based on how much we liked their anonymous reply on our form (“Why are you interested in talking about friendship?”). We didn’t look at names, gender, age, or anything else.
We split people into pairs of two to ask each other questions (ranging from “What brings you joy?” to “What’s a difficult conversation you’ve had lately?”), did introductions in a big group and talked about our relationships with friends, discussed times in our lives when our friendships felt good and not-so-good, and discussed individual conversations that we wanted to have with people in our lives.
We found that the people we’d gathered were really interested in talking to each other. We also found that many of us were afraid of conflict. As in: how do I ask my friend if they’re mad at me? How do I reach out to a friend whom I no longer talk to? How can I tell someone I want to be closer to them? How do I have a conversation with my friend who’s stopped hanging out with me ever since they got a boyfriend?
We decided to do the same workshop in New York, with one major change: this one would focus more on conflict. The term we used was generative conflict: as in, conflict that was productive instead of destructive.
In my own life, I’ve noticed that I often avoid certain conversations or topics because I believe that the other person “can’t handle it”--they’ll get mad at me, they’ll stop wanting to be friends, I won’t be able to express what I mean. And then every time I have The Conversation, things get better. If there’s one piece of advice I give people most it’s this: Say it sooner rather than later. Don’t wait for the perfect words. They rarely come.
It felt very cool to be able to spend a whole afternoon exploring this topic with more people. Here’s the schedule for the second workshop:
Here is a picture of us:
I’ve really liked meeting more subscribers. If this doesn’t seem like your kind of thing but you want to meet other Bookbear readers, don’t worry: I plan on doing More Events this year (meetups! matchmaking!). But I’m focusing the workshops for now because they’ve been so fun and they’re a great space to explicitly discuss a topic many of us are very interested in.
Anyway: register here! Thank you for reading and for supporting my work.