If your body was given ultimate agency what would it say? What stories would it tell?
Calul Workshops:
a home for the woman with an untold story
Calul Workshops are a new series of safe, expertly guided creative opportunities to get your story — the story your body has been carrying around for decades — finally out onto the page. For many of us stories are a balm and a guide — helping us process what is intense, tender, or unresolved within us and in our world. Our lives are both mesmerizing and simultaneously unknowable. Our futures, no matter how much we plan, are uncertain. In this uncertainty, it is stories, our stories, that we need to inspire our courage every day and into our future.
At Calul Workshops our genre-blending workshops will help you to connect with your historical stories, your personal stories, even your traumatic stories, and help you get them on the page. At Calul we begin with language, developing the ability to express something deeply personal and to handle your material in a respectful way that allays fear and becomes your story: real and tangible.
Writing with Calul Workshops, something quietly extraordinary will happen when you see your own words on the page for the first time. The story that lived only in your body will now exist outside of you. What you have carried, your life — all of it, the tender, the wonderful, the difficult and the unspeakable will be set down. It will have shape. It will be formed of language. It will be, at last, yours to hold and yours to share.
This is not simply the act of writing. It is the act of becoming. Of recognizing, perhaps for the first time, that your experience was always worthy of beautiful language. Women who have sat in these circles have described it as the moment they finally felt seen, not by others alone, but by themselves. That is the transformation that writing with Calul Workshops can bring..
Elul
Writing Opportunity
Because the work of the Viduy — the confessional prayer at the heart of Yom Kippur — cannot be completed in twenty-five hours of fasting and prayer alone. It asks something of us that takes time, quiet, and a safe place to go deep. It asks us to be honest. Not performatively honest — genuinely, specifically, personally honest. About what we have done. About what we have left undone. About who we have been to ourselves and to those we love. And then — and this is the part the tradition insists upon — to return. To release the weight. To begin again.
This Elul, I am offering your community a writing series built around exactly that journey.
The Elul Writing Series: Returning to Yourself Through the Vidui
Four single sessions via Zoom — Elul 5786
Sundays, August 23 – September 13, 2026
9:00 AM Pacific / 12:00 PM Eastern / 7:00 PM Israel
Each session runs two hours and stands entirely on its own. We begin with readings from both literary and traditional texts. We write with guided prompts designed to take each woman into her own emotional urgency and toward a clear vision for the year ahead. Women may join one session or all four. No writing experience is needed. No prior knowledge of the liturgy is required — only the willingness to look honestly at your own life and the readiness to begin.
Session One — Ashamnu: We Have Been Guilty
Sunday, August 23 (1 Elul 5786)
We begin at the beginning — with the Ashamnu, the short confessional, an alphabetical acrostic in which we recite, together and in the plural, a complete inventory of human failing from aleph to tav. Not my sins. Our sins. The plural is not accidental — it is the genius of Jewish confession. We say we so that no one stands alone in their shame. We say we because we are responsible for the society we have built together, for the silences we have maintained together, for the world we have allowed together. We bang our chests lightly with each word: we have been guilty, we have betrayed, we have stolen, we have spoken falsely.
In this session we will sit with the radical honesty of the Ashamnu and ask: what does it mean to confess — not to God, not to a rabbi, but to the page? We will write from the communal we toward the personal I. We will use the alphabetical structure of the Ashamnu as a writing form — moving through the letters of our own life's inventory, naming what we have been and what we have done, not as self-punishment but as the first honest breath of the year. The accounting that makes everything else possible.
Join for Session One
Session Two — Al Chet: What the Body Knows
Sunday, August 30 (8 Elul 5786)
The Al Chet is the longer confession — forty-four specific categories of transgression, recited ten times across Yom Kippur, moving through the alphabet twice. It is the most embodied prayer in our liturgy: we beat our chests as we speak, the body participating in what the words are doing. And when you read the Al Chet closely — not as a list of sins but as a map of human experience — what you find is that it is really a catalogue of the ways we have silenced ourselves and others. For the sin we have committed through hardening of the heart. For the sin of not knowing our own strength. For the sin of words spoken in haste. For the sin of the narrowed eye and the closed fist.
These are not abstract theological transgressions. They are the specific, embodied, daily ways we have diminished the divine image in ourselves and in others. Many of them — especially for women — are the sins of smallness: the times we stayed quiet when we should have spoken, the times we shrank when we had every right to stand.
In this session we will enter the Al Chet through the body. We will write about what the chest knows, what the hands remember, what the body has been carrying that the mind has been too afraid to name. We will use the confessional form not as indictment but as liberation — as the permission to finally set down what we have been carrying, word by precise word.
Join for Session Two
Session Three — Teshuvah, Tefillah, Tzedakah: The Three Returns
Sunday, September 6 (15 Elul 5786)
At the heart of the Unetaneh Tokef — the great poem of the Days of Awe — is the line that the entire liturgy builds toward: U'teshuvah, u'tefillah, u'tzedakah ma'avirin et ro'ah hagezeirah. Return, prayer, and righteous acts transform the harshness of what has been decreed. Not cancel it. Not erase it. Transform it.
These three words are the tradition's answer to the question of what we are actually supposed to do with all this honest accounting. Teshuvah — return, turning, the ability to change course and come back to your truest self. Tefillah — prayer, the ability to let the world take your breath away, to articulate what you hope for, to speak toward something larger than yourself. Tzedakah — righteousness, the ability to give of yourself, to act from generosity, to repair what has been broken.
In this session we will write toward all three. What does return look like in your life — not as theology but as a specific, embodied act? What have you been praying for that you have not yet allowed yourself to say aloud? What does it mean to give yourself what you have been giving to everyone else? We will use the three pillars as writing prompts, moving through each one toward the question at the center: who is the woman you are returning to?
Join for Session Three
Session Four — V'Al Kulam: For All of These, Forgive
Sunday, September 13 (22 Elul 5786 — the Ten Days of Awe)
The Viduy ends with a closing plea that is said after every confessional: V'Al Kulam, Eloha Selichot, Selach Lanu, Mechal Lanu, Kaper Lanu — For all of these, God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement. The tradition asks us to say these words and mean them. To actually receive the forgiveness we have been asking for. Not to carry it still.
This is the session that arrives during the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — the days the tradition calls the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the ten days when the gates are still open and the Book of Life is still being written. We have accounted. We have confessed. We have named what the body knows and turned toward the three great returns. Now we practice the hardest act of all: forgiving ourselves.
In this session we will write toward forgiveness — not abstractly but specifically. We will write the letter we have been waiting to receive. We will write the self we are releasing and the self we are choosing to bring into 5787. We will write the one sentence — the intention, the return, the promise to ourselves — that we want to carry through the gates before they close.
Not as resolution. As teshuvah. As the act of returning to the whole self that has been waiting all year.
Join for Session Four
Join for All Four Sessions
Special Elul Pricing — based on Chai (חי):
Individual session: $108 — six times chai, six times life. Because the work of return is the work of choosing to live more fully.
All four sessions: $360 — the gematria of שלם, wholeness.
Because that is what this series is for: not perfection, not self-punishment, but the return to the whole self that has been waiting all year to be found.
Why Write With Me?
You have been carrying something. I know, because I've been in the room when people finally put it down.
Not the polished version. Not the story shaped for comfort. The real one — the one that lives in the body, in the place where silence settled decades ago because you were told, in a hundred quiet ways, that it was too much.
I am a scholar of exactly this: what happens when people find language for what they were told to keep quiet. My PhD research was about the poems women write from their bodies. I have spent years reading the the writing of those who dared first, and understanding what made it possible for them to go there.
I came to writing the way most of us do — sideways, through grief, through wonder, through a body that needed language before it knew what to say. I've spent years learning to translate that need into craft: as a poet, as a scholar, as someone who sat with the words of Holocaust survivor Abba Kovner and found that even the most broken language reaches toward something whole.
What I offer is not a craft class. It is something closer to permission — held inside a space that is technically rigorous and emotionally safe. I will give you the writings of women who have already written what you are afraid to write. I will give you a prompt that goes somewhere necessary and specific. I will give you time and the support of a circle of women who are doing the same thing, and I will bring my full attention to what you make.
You do not need to be a writer. You need to have lived. And you need to be ready — even a little, even uncertainly — to begin.
Your story is not too much. It is, in fact, exactly enough.
And something shifts when your story finally exists outside of you. Not as memory. Not as weight. As language — shaped, chosen, yours. Women have sat in these circles and described that moment as the first time they truly recognized themselves: not as someone who survived, or endured, or stayed quiet, but as someone whose life was always worth this level of attention. That recognition does not leave you. It changes what you believe is possible — on the page, and beyond it.
That wholeness is what Calul Workshops is about.
Hakol Calul. Everything is included. It's not a slogan — it's a theology of the page. Language is not decorative. It is generative. Your words matter. Whatever you are carrying — your history, your body, your silence, your doubt — that is exactly the material we work with.
I won't ask you to write like anyone else. I will ask you to write more like yourself than you ever have before.
In Calul Workshops, we read widely, we write dangerously, we hold each other's risks with care. We work across tradition and form, across what's comfortable and what's necessary.
Come write with me.
Testimonials
At Ritualwell, we have been blessed to have had Rachel facilitate a number of online courses related to Judaism, ritual and poetry. She is both knowledgeable and wise, engaging and deeply caring for her students. Rachel works well with our participants who come from a diverse background in terms of both literary and Jewish experience and she offers inspiration and craft tools that reach everyone.
–Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer,
Director of Virtual Content and Programs for Ritualwell
I was a bit hesitant at first to sign up for an online workshop. I prefer face-to-face
conversations to the cold anonymity of computer class, especially when it comes to
something as personal as my own work.
But I quickly found that Rachel’s workshop was just what I needed. She manages to
foster an atmosphere that is intellectually stimulating but also warm and nurturing. At the
beginning of every week she posts poems (by older, established poets) to engage us in a
discussion of craft. Prompts and a word list inspire us to write new work.
Once we post our own poems, she provides thoughtful and constructive feedback. Rachel
has given me some of the best feedback I’ve ever gotten on my work. She is a careful,
close, informed reader who can be very supportive and enthusiastic, but also blunt and
honest when the poem requires it.
I love the weekly deadlines. This workshop has helped get me out of a writing slump and
given me the confidence to post new work, even if it’s not perfect, because I know that
writing is not about creating an end product. It’s about process. A constant process of
writing and revising and pushing oneself to go deeper and become a better poet. Rachel’s
workshop has helped me do that.
--Angie Vorhies
After taking two workshops with Rachel I cannot say enough about Rachel and her brilliant and committed and supportive and generous teaching. Poems began to knock on my wall and ask to be let in. Rachel’s enthusiasm about her subjects and deep belief in poetry’s necessity in this fractured world opened me up in a way I did not expect.
--Amy Small-McKinney
Calul Workshops
Services and Pricing
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Four-week workshop series: $400 USD
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One-day taster workshops: $125 USD
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One to one writing coach: $75/ hour
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Editing Services: $150/ hour
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Private manuscript work: $3,000-5,000 (by application only)
Feel free to contact me about any of the above services at calulworkshops@gmail.com