Writing Club: The Stories We Tell
Guided by Noor Tagouri and Sophie Strand
4 Sundays: February 1, 8, 15, 22
11 AM - 1 PM EST | Virtual Gathering on Zoom
Every story, like every human body, is an ecosystem of other stories. The ancestors who shaped us. The land that held us. The questions and beliefs we inherited.
This is a writing club for people who sense that their stories are not theirs alone, that personal narrative and collective myth, the body and the earth, are more entangled than we've been taught to believe.
AYS Writing Club operates on a core belief: your stories are already alive in you. Over four Sundays, we gather to write what's actually alive in us.
The Invitation
Writing Club will guide you through listening, excavating, and giving form to the stories waiting to be told out loud.
Drawing from Sophie Strand's ecological and mythological approach to storytelling and Noor Tagouri's work as a journalist, independent storyteller, and Self-Investigation practice, these gatherings weave together the personal and the collective, the embodied and the imagined.
Whether you're writing memoir, fiction, poetry, or something that doesn't have a name yet, this is an invitation for you.
Logistics
- Dates: 4 Sundays in February (Feb 1, 8, 15, 22)
- Time: 11AM-1PM EST (New York)
- Format: Live virtual gathering on Zoom
- Recordings: Available to registered participants
The Structure
Writing Club unfolds across four live sessions held each Sunday in February.
Each week includes:
- Sessions with Noor Tagouri and Sophie Strand
- Guided writing prompts
- Spacious time to write
- Reflection and optional sharing
- Closing integration
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Between Sessions: Our Discord community holds space for ongoing connection.
More specifically, each 2-hour session follows a rhythm (subject to change):
- Opening (15 min): Grounding practice + theme introduction
- Teaching (25 min): Core concept from Sophie and/or Noor
- Collective Writing (30 min): Timed prompts, pens moving
- Group Sharing/Reading (35 min): Voluntary reading + witnessing truths
- Closing (15 min): Integration practice + week's invitation
We follow a four-part arc drawn from Noor's Self-Investigation framework: Remember. Connect. Get Free. Be Here Now. Not as a linear progression, but as a spiral, one you'll continue walking long after we part.
Themes and prompts will be shared ahead of the first gathering.
Sessions are live on Zoom. Recordings will be available to all registered participants.
The Journey
Week 1: REMEMBER
What are the materials, characters, circumstances that made you, you? The body remembers before the mind does. Stories live in the ecosystem of our nervous systems, our connective tissue, our bones. We begin with an embodied excavation of what we carry in our soma, asking curiously where it came from and what it wants to speak into existence.
Week 2: CONNECT
Your story is woven into a larger living fabric. We trace the threads between personal experience and collective pattern, between individual body and living land. What myths have been shaping you without your explicit understanding? Whose voices haunt your writing, even when you don't name them? Can we acknowledge we are polyphonic beings, singing stories started long before our personal births?
Week 3: GET FREE
Freedom isn't only found at the end of the wellness narrative, when our wholeness and healing are neatly resolved. Some stories don’t have happy endings. Some stories limit collective survival and need to be composted. Some truths need to be spoken even when they terrify us. We name what the silent stories we’ve been protecting at personal and collective expense.
Week 4: BE HERE NOW
The body is a doorway, not the house. Stories pass through us; they don't belong to us. We practice releasing our writing into the world while staying rooted in presence. The cycle continues.
Who This Is For
- Writers at any stage working in any genre: memoir, fiction, poetry, essays, or something unnamed
- Anyone who senses their personal story is connected to something larger
- Those drawn to writing as excavation, investigation, or ceremony
- People who want to write in community rather than isolation
- Anyone ready to ask the questions they've been avoiding
You do not need to call yourself a writer to belong here.
INVESTMENT & ACCESS
Full Investment: Sliding Scale Starting at $99 (Full Value: $499)
Your registration includes all live sessions, recordings, resources and broader AYS community access including our Discord channel, meetups and more.
Scholarships Available
No one should be kept from this work due to finances. If you'd like to request financial assistance, please email [email protected] and we will be in contact with options.
Sponsor a Seat
Gift a seat to someone requesting scholarship. Any amount that you contribute over the $99 suggested fee directly supports the scholarship fund for someone in your cohort.
Join Writing Club
Spots are limited to preserve the intimacy of the container.
Full session themes and details will be shared prior to our first gathering.
For questions and inquiries: [email protected]
At Your Service
Your Guides
Sophie Strand is an author, poet and mythologist whose work lives at the intersection of ecology, storytelling, and the body. Author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, and The Body Is a Doorway, she teaches that myths are not artifacts but living ecosystems with root systems beneath them and that our personal stories tap into ancient mycelial networks of narrative connecting us to everyone who has ever tried to make sense of being alive.
Noor Tagouri is a journalist who has investigated the darkest corners of our world and found the light of humanity in all of them. Her most recent audio documentary, REP: A Story About the Stories We Tell, asks the hard questions about truth, objectivity, media representation, and our individual and collective relationship with the stories we tell.
Noor's forthcoming book guides readers through the process of Self-Investigation, and documents what happens when you question everything you thought you knew about your own life and let the investigation change you. She brings the rigor of asking hard questions and the courage to sit with answers that don't arrive as periods, but as portals.
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We live in an age that flattens stories into content, reduces bodies to problems to be solved, and severs us from the land and lineages that grew us. Both Noor and Sophie have spent years in the counter-practice: rooting stories back into their ecosystems, their bodies, their questions.
About AYS Clubs
AYS Clubs are intimate three to six week virtual courses that blend storytelling, self-investigation, and community connection.
Each Sunday, curious minds from around the world gather for book-club-meets-lecture experiences exploring themes like poetry, representation, financial literacy, and life’s biggest questions.
Over 1,000 community members across 20+ clubs have gathered to dig deeper into who they are and what matters to them, with access to expert guest co-hosts, private Discord community, and session recordings.
Past AYS Clubs include REP Club, Poetry Club, Death Club, Wild Woman Club, and the Storyteller Summit.
Storytelling as a service, right to your inbox. Join our growing community to witness, experience, and contribute to our collective story.