Welcoming MELISSA WORD
We’re thrilled to host Melissa Word as our Liminal Artist in Residence at SOLA this July! If you’re not yet familiar with her work, you’re in for a treat. And if you doknow Melissa, we know you’re doing that happy dance right along with us!
Through embodied movement, ritual, and creative practice, Melissa’s work invites us into deeper relationship with grief, repair, and community. My experience of her as a facilitator has been so inspiring—she’s the real deal: wild and raw, tender and deeply human, hilariously irreverent, and profoundly devotional.
Melissa creates spaces that inspire participants toward full permission in their unique expression—a generous container to be with both the Divine and the humanness in all of it. I cannot say enough how much I love working with her, and how much I’ve witnessed and received her work as life-changing.
In short, y’all are gonna love her!!
Here are some ways you can experience her work while she’s in town…
And if you’re not in town, you can find Melissa Word here, via her website.
Events & Offerings with Melissa
Grief Threads: A collective ritual of hand-sewn memory and grief mapping
Wednesday, July 23, 5:00–8:30pm
Grief Threads is a sewing workshop for moving with grief—old grief, ancestral grief, current world grief—and transmuting the heaviness we carry via soft, supple creative practice.
Grief Threads is a place to make your grief visible, and to hear what it has come to teach you. To be a student of collapse and stitch the fragments into something new and fortified.
Together, we’ll gather around a communal scrap pile and learn to create free-form textile collages—maps of our inner weather. We invite our grief to shapeshift with thread, cloth, and scrappy ritual. Not to fix or erase it, but to give it form for a moment. To move it through.
Making art with our hands—especially together—is grief transmutation. It’s spiritual hygiene. A way of clearing what has been weighing on us, and letting new meaning emerge through gesture and cloth.
This offering is for grief that is lived with, not freshly ruptured. Please reach out if you are experiencing acute, recent loss to see if this experience will be suitable for you.
Sign up here.
Cry Baby Dance: A dance floor for rinsing out big feelings and fanning creative fires
Friday, July 25, 6:00–7:15pm
Crybaby is guided movement experience for shifting attention.
We get out of overythinky mode and slip down into the kaleidoscopic world of body sensations.
We practice moving from intuition and instinct. No steps to learn, no ‘getting it right’
This is smooshy floor-rolling and cathartic ass-jostling for clearing out the channel and settling deeply into your own skin.
Bring your unruly body and your messy moods to the dance floor, we’ve got some things to jiggle LOOSE.
Sign up here.
1:1 Sessions with Melissa
Somatic Art Mentorship for creative unfolding and grief-diving
Being a prolific creative visionary is your default mode, not just a special experience reserved for people who call themselves artists.
Welcome to Creative Somatics, where you get to bone up on the ecstatic art of letting it rip. As in, to have full, unencumbered access to your flow. To move and speak and express from the endless stream of creative intelligence flushing through you in every moment. To be fully LOCKED IN with the part of you connected to God, the Mystery, the Muses, the cosmic watering hose of inspiration and do the creative work your spirit came here to do.
Inspiration flows in, rivers of expression flow out
Melissa is available for in-person 1:1 sessions (11:00am–3:00pm):
Tuesday, July 22
Thursday, July 24
Tuesday, July 29
Thursday, July 31
Book your session here.
More about Melissa…
Melissa Word is a movement artist, somatic coach, and death doula whose work centers grief, ritual, and embodied creative expression. She supports individuals and communities in navigating transitions, tending to loss, and reclaiming their aliveness through hands-on, heart-led practice. Melissa’s workshops blend poetic presence, intuitive structure, and a deep respect for the body’s wisdom. Grief Threads is one expression of her interdisciplinary work—where art-making becomes ritual, and the ordinary becomes sacred.