SALTEE + WEST
is a six-month online workshop series addressing the needs and challenges of neurodivergent creators.
About the Series:
SALTEE + WEST is a collaboration between Sara Saltee and Melissa West. We are friends and colleagues with a shared passion for exploring and addressing the needs of creative people who, like us, are highly sensitive, complex, and intense, or who feel otherwise neurodivergent.
We believe that our cultural history of pathologizing and othering neurodivergent people has deprived the world of untold creative contributions. We want to change that story. We are not about parsing diagnoses here - all are welcome!
SALTEE + WEST Workshop Participants say:
“WOW! Excellent session today. Melissa is a jewel.”
“Thank you, Sara, for such authentic expressiveness in the workshop. Your words, your openness cut through the surface of all the debris that seems to be falling from the sky and coating my heart lately.”
“One of the most powerful couple of workshop hours I’ve ever spent!”
About Your Facilitators:
Sara Saltee is an artist, writer, and Founder of the Saltee Academy for Complex Creators. With deep caring and unending curiosity, Sara helps wholly original women navigate complex creative identities, meet the challenges of the creating process, and design lives that honor and express the fullness of their gifts.
Melissa West brings heart, humor, and an extraordinary range of perspectives to this conversation. As a neurospicy/highly sensitive artist, author, and depth psychotherapist/coach, she offers compassion and insight into the challenges of living and creating as an “other,” and powerful tools for finding deep acceptance and honoring of ourselves and our creative processes.
Workshop Details:
Workshops meet live on Zoom the second Saturday of each month January - June, 2025.
The interactive Saltee + West workshops are 90 minutes long and combine presentation, conversation, and self-reflection activities.
Join individual workshops for $30 each, or subscribe to the six-month season for $150.
If the $30 workshop fee is a barrier for you, please email Sara and we’ll work it out.
The SALTEE + WEST Series
January 11
Please subscribe to the Saltee + West Series to access this and other past workshop recordings.
February 8
How do we stay alive in our despair?
As highly sensitive, complex, and intense people, we neurodivergent creators can find ourselves particularly vulnerable to experiencing persistent worry and feelings of hopelessness.
Our acute perceptiveness makes it challenging to tune out the calamities of the world, and our orientation to truth-telling makes it hard for us to fake a sense of false positivity about things that are frankly awful.
In this online workshop, we begin by acknowledging that despair can be an appropriate response to the conditions of the world, and sometimes the conditions of our own lives. But we’ll investigate together how we as creatives can access pathways to aliveness and hope that allow us to work skillfully with despair, and even make something of it.
We’ll explore:
· What wisdom can we glean from artists, writers, and other creators who have worked with and through times of despair?
· How can we build the inner and outer resources we need to live with feelings of despair without being taken down by them?
· How can we intentionally use our creative practice to transmute despair into possibility?
This workshop is part of the six-month Saltee + West series. To learn more about the series and subscribe to all six workshops, please visit www.salteeacademy.com/salteewest
March 8
Come get inspired by wildly divergent models of creative freedom, explore the edges of your own freedom, and find new inner permissions to break free!
This 1944 image of Georgia O’Keefe gleefully riding off into the desert in her goggles and dungarees embodies an iconic, inspirational freedom of spirit. Yet, for most of us, exiting the bounds of family and society is not an available or desirable route to the freedom we seek.
In this 90-minute online workshop, we’ll explore what freedom looks and feels like for you and chart ways you can expand the territory in which you are truly free to follow your authentic creative impulses and honor your innate intelligence.
We’ll share some of the wildly divergent strategies that women creators have used to claim the inner and outer space their creative spirits demand.
And, we’ll explore the dynamics that lead us restrict our own freedom in conscious and unconscious ways: the tensions between freedom and belonging, the powerful cultural and familial pressures that work to keep women domesticated and tame, and the subtle ways we may still be waiting for others to grant us permission to follow our creative life force.
Ready to bust some taboos in the messy, awkward space of freedom? This one’s for you!
April 12
You Were Built to Enchant the World:
On Neurodivergent Creatives as Magicians
As neurodivergent creators, we have access to ways of seeing, being, and percieving that exceed the logics of the linear, concrete world.
In this workshop, we’ll celebrate our special role as highly sensitive, intense, and complex beings designed to reveal deeper levels of reality and expose possibilities that transcend the ordinary.
Full description and registration info coming soon
May 10
Creativity as Celebration
In creativity, we find a different relationship to being alive. Joy, humor, and celebration are all disruptive forces that break through the contracted mindsets of daily life and upset the control and confinement of power-over systems. Come discover the particular role that neuorodivergent people have to play in holding space for absurdity and playful abandon.
Full description and registration info coming soon
June 14
Creating with Our Ancestors
As neurodivergent creators, many of us find it difficult to find the support and connection we crave and require. In this workshop, we’ll explore how broadening our vision of available support to include our ancestors - both genetic and chosen - can open us to new experiences of belonging, solace, and assistance.
Full description and registration info coming soon
A Saltee + West series subscription automatically enrolls you in all six of the workshops in this 2025 offering.
As a series subscriber, you’ll receive a reminder and join link by email a week prior to each workshop, access all workshop recordings, and save $30 over the cost of six individual workshops.