Between the Lines
Men & Women… Writing, Reading, Speaking, Listening
with Amanda Aileen Fisher
and Dillon Porter
Between the Lines is a guided Abre Tu Boca writing event with men and women doing what they always want, but sometimes can’t:
Talking.
Listening.
Communicating.
Exploring their most intimate space:
the interior.
But this is just a writing circle, guided by two writers. We write. We read the writing out loud. And we talk about the writing. Keeping it all strictly on topic. But when you have a capture of your subconscious and it’s being mirrored back to you by “the other,” a few extra things inevitably happen.
Something might stretch.
Or catch.
Or loosen.
All sorts of things just might move inside you.
Saturday 2/15
2:30-4:30PM
Cien Palmas
Entry Options:
Option 1. Pre-pay to guarantee a seat by purchasing a ticket through Eventbrite. Reservations are limited.
Option 2: The remaining seats are first come, first served at the door, entry by sliding scale: 250-500 MXN.
Arrive promptly or you’ll miss it.
Write & read in English or Spanish.
Stay after to eat, drink, or mingle. Full menu available from Cien Palmas.
Thank you to Cien Palmas for being our location sponsor for this event.
Curious? Then read.
From the ATB Press, here 4 pieces that emerged during previous gatherings.
These 2 pieces of writing emerged from the same gathering, with the same ATB writing prompt. An ATB writing prompt is particular. It’s the beginning of a sentence that drops you into your story. It knocks on the door of your subconscious, and something inside you gets up to answer. Pen to paper, you record it.
By Zoë Dearborn, reprinted with permission from Zoë’s Substack, ZOËLAB.
I am sharing here an unedited writing piece, for the sake of showing process, which stumbled out of me for Between The Lines — a spontaneous writing happening held by Amanda Aileen Fisher of Abre Tu Boca, in Todos Santos.
The women met in a group in one part of Cien Palmas, an elegant courtyard of a boutique hotel and restaurant, and the men met in another group. We couldn’t see each other, but we, the women, knew where the men were. I’m not sure if the men knew where we were. We had both received the same prompt, but the gendered articles were swapped, randomly. Some people in each group received, written on tiny slips of paper, “She watched form the table as he…” and some people received, “He watched from the table as she…” Both in English and in Spanish.
We all wrote for 10 minutes and then shared our pieces with the group. After a few of us shared within the gender-divided groups, the men came to join the women’s group. We had left them the less comfortable, less queenly chairs. And they sat down hesitantly. The giddiness and curiosity was palpable as the two groups merged. And the feedback from those of the opposite sex felt charged. People mostly wrote of relationships, beginning or ending. And only one piece was sexual, which almost wasn’t shared, but was, at the very end.
Here is what I wrote, but only shared with the women, before the men had joined:
She watched from the table as he got up suddenly to blow his nose with a force no one expected. At first it was alarming, and she jolted a little out of her dining room chair, but then a giggle hiccuped out of her throat, that also alarmed her, which then exploded messily into a full blown laugh. The strange sounds came from her lower throat, gurgling, and out of control, embarrassingly so, but too strange to be held back. And as he heard those laughs, as he blew his nose, he couldn’t help but join in, making new guttural sounds to accompany her throat laughs and his forceful nose blowing.
He stood there, suspended in the absurdity of the moment, locked by their mutual gaze, and in that moment, love bloomed out of each of their hearts, not with force, but with fast-paced grace, like the timelapse footage of a blooming rose, looking fast and slow at the same time. It was like that between them, a recognition of something that had always been there, a root planted in nurtured soil, but that had not yet broken ground to the air above. It was as if the force from the body, which made them let go, allowed the depths that they were both afraid of to unpause.
By David Power
He watched from the table as she, for reasons unknown, removed a full set of false teeth from her mouth — uppers and lowers — and plopped them down wetly and without acknowledgement next to her “gin and tonic with lemon… not lime.”
“Your teeth!” he half-asked, half-exclaimed, “They’re not… uhm… real?!”
“Oh, they’re real.” she replied, “They’re just not my ‘mine,’ per se.”
To describe him as “shocked” would have egregiously undersold his lived experience. I mean, how in god’s name — in the year 2025 — was it possible that an attractive 34-year-old woman could have “real but not hers” teeth? And remove them at the dinner table? On a first date?
“Some kind of… genetic condition, I assume?” he asked, doing his best to conceal his horror-sprinkled-with-joy.
“No.” she countered bluntly.
“It’s just… braces, flossing, brushing, fillings, checkups… they’re all such a waste of time. A giant pain in the fanny.”
“Fanny???” he puzzled silently.
She was a British woman.
It was the most satisfying date he’d had in seven years.
By Dillon Porter, Abre Tu Boca Co-Facilitator of Between the Lines
She stood in the kitchen doorway looking at me. Her eyes said everything.
That seems incredible. The moment, as I stop to think about it, try to rationalize that thought – that her eyes said everything. As if everything – every last thing – were in that kitchen. The salt flecks, the Chinese oranges, the chopped bok choy and diced tomatoes – all those morsels of delectable deliciousness, fecundity of abundance – silenced. Shut up. Shut off because her eyes were speaking now. Let the cream boil over, let the eggs go bad, let the chickens roost until Thanksgiving and never heed the rooster. Her eyes were saying everything.
Blood in my stomach. It was coming and I knew it. Knew to brace for the woodwinds. Let the inner walls of fortitude crumble and fall down. Let the Citadel be stormed, overwhelmed. Let the legions of little micro-less-than-dreams be pulled over the hot coals of reality. Her eyes are saying everything now, containing everything – a matter so strong, a force so much further formed than your soft belly and flaccid torso, the deflated balloons of gutted innards.
She stood in the doorway. I stood too, weaker than I had imagined I would be, more raw, more ready, the rumble of the stones of my insides louder. How I would have to rearrange you again, my stones. Every last thing in the kitchen – the coriander and dill weed pushing me out of the threshold with a force twice as strong as the one that pulled me in. Lest the wall should crack and fall down, bending and craning my neck, my wings folded – I did not want to knock over your lamp or scare the birds from the fence post. I see I have disquieted the kitchen.
I saw it clearly in her eyes, immediate.
She had voiced it to me in straightforward tones:
“You know that way you spoke to him? Don't ever talk that way to me.”
By Amanda Aileen Fisher, Abre Tu Boca Founder & Co-Facilitator of Between the Lines
The red spilled across tiles. A shadow crawling. A shadow standing still. It spills again now, across time. It spills and stains everything that tone, and I wonder: has it really been a leak all these eight years, from that April 14th to this one? So slow and dilatory that it gradually shifted me into a color blindness?
That moment haunts – that fraction of one, that fraction of him – his shoes. His shoes on those tiles as my escalator rose, causing him to vanish part by part, until only his Cheerwine red Chucks remained. Those shoes, unsure where to go next – forward, when there was no back, and where would be the forward? How would be the forward?
Poor boy. I unleashed him on that train station floor. Did he know he was leashed? Did I? Or was it me? Poor us.
It feels as if those feet never moved, even though I've heard they have. Did I cause him to leave something there? Did I cause his soles to impress into mine? Is this what karma is? Will I have to go back and walk in those? Is it what I do now? Is it my turn to be left behind at some sort of turnstile, click, click, zing, eight years discarded? Here I am – it has been another eight.
I am having a holy terror moment, and I'm understanding the placement of that word, holy. It is a sacred moment of showing, of knowing, the terror revealing things inside that need listening to.
Dearly departed, we have gathered here today for yet another wake. How many of them must I endure? How many times must I wormhole it up from a back road that leads me right fucking back to square one of those train station tiles? Two leap years ago. How do we have the rhythms in us? Where in the body are they stored?
The red spills anger, and then at its bitter edge, it turns to grief, oxidized with all this air into a dirt orange tinged sickly green. I wish I could vomit, purge the memory crawling up from my gut, digging fingernails into entrails to pull its way up. Invoked and midwifed by a completely different man – the one who is here now to put his eyes into me. Finally birthed, from its eight-year gestation: the grief of everything breaking and no blood spilling out.
But now, eight years later, there are more faces stacked, so that I face them all, hear them all, the cacophony of their voices and my many own. I look them all in the eyes, the ones who aren’t here to look back at me. Eyes against eyes against eyes, angled mirrors. All these men have informed me. Stuck a finger in, whole hand, whole body. Stirred. This man sitting as the head to this one body now has no idea the spells he is unbinding. Spells we are unbinding. Is this what I feel? The anxiety of unleashing from that tightrope chokehold and the grip giving way?
Today, I bring him my offering, which is me – these entrails. What else do I have, to unzip and let fall out at feet? Skin is gone. Bone turned to liquid.
If I say it, will he leave? And I'm not sure who he is. He. He. He. He.
If I tell him I see.
What to tell them all? What to gather up into this one voice that is mine on this day and say back to them and to myself – the thing that will ricochet to make hearts bleed again?
“What I’m hearing is that you don’t think you’re fit somehow.
You are.
But I can’t stand here long enough for you to realize.”
