Jojo Donovan

I am a poet, facilitator, storyteller, and trauma worker who uses writing and ritual to connect survivors of abuse with our own body-brilliance, with each other, and with the living, animate world that is fighting for survival alongside us.  

I am also a non-binary trans woman, a survivor, a priestess, a pleasure-monger, a word-witch, a mystic. I did not plan to become these things. I tried very hard to be a good normal Catholic [boy], and instead I stumbled my way into spell-casting and ecstatic trance and a deep love for all my body knows and feels. I am grateful.

I am also a body made mostly of story. The story of my journey into trans identity is also the story of healing from intimate partner abuse, which is the story of reclaiming pleasure and sexuality, of shifting my relationship to depression and anxiety, of venturing into spirituality of nature and the body.

I believe in language as a fluid body that does all the things fluid bodies do. Stories bubble up, well, cascade. Flood, swell, splash. Grow stagnant, fill with algae and swamp-stink bubbles. Trickle and flow. Harbor life. Drown us. Wash us clean. I write mostly to build containers for unruly stories. I write mostly to tip those containers over and watch what happens.

I believe that what survivors know - the new ways of seeing opened when illusions of safety and order are fractured, the ability to sit in dark and messy and liminal spaces, the will to craft a life piece by piece when what was known has shattered - is indispensable to navigating the interpersonal, social, and ecological crises caused by capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

I believe in the power of ritual to help us enchant and in-habit the long, messy, daily work of shifting patterns of behavior that once enabled us to survive but no longer serve us. I help groups and individuals craft their own rituals to grieve what has been lost; honor what has survived; imagine what may be possible; shift what has grown stagnant; and develop new habits of connection, tenderness, and creative world-building.

I am a child of my dad’s self-taught woodworking and my mom’s grammar songs. Of one grandma’s paintings and another’s patient play, of one grandpa’s wit and another’s beaded flowers. And I’m a child of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and Rich’s Dream of a Common Language. Of Octavia Butler’s positive obsession and Ursula Le Guin’s other wind. I’m a child of Lorde’s uses of the erotic, and I’m slowly learning what it means to be a child of her transformation of silence into language and action. I’m a wide-eyed child in awe of Marsha on the street and of Sylvia on the stage and of all the queer mothers whose names I’ve yet to learn.

I live in Portland, Oregon, where the moss is stunning and the crows are loud. I write stories in coffee shops, climb friendly trees, and dance when the sun comes out. I am finishing my MA at Goddard Graduate Institute, where I get to study/birth/inhabit Survivor Magic, an embodied poetics/ritual practice that seeks out and celebrates the creative, subversive, liberatory potential within experiences of trauma.