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!
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
Note from Sara and Melissa:
Please know that the topics below are subject to change and/or re-ordering. These are extraordinary times and we cannot predict what will be happening, what our needs will be, and what we’ll be learning as we go.
So, we will be keeping our ear to the ground and will exercise our freedom to invent alternative offerings that meet the emergent needs of participants as needed. As topics get finalized and confirmed, we’ll announce them both here and in the Saltee Academy News.
January 11
Saturday, January 11th
10 am - 12 pm PST
(a special, 2-hour workshop)
This will be no ordinary, business-as-usual January setting of goals and objectives.
We will all be facing into a deeply challenging year, both individually and collectively. This gathering will be about creating a welcoming container for us to feel hope and connection so that we are free to dream into the radical unknown.
In this workshop, Melissa and Sara will offer inspiring ideas about the essential roles that neurodivergent people play in times of of struggle and turmoil, and we’ll guide deep reflection on the creative gifts you were born to offer in this moment.
We’ll also offer a process to help you connect to the sources of power and sustenance you will access in the months ahead.
February 8
Creativity, Despair, and the Life Force
“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.” - Rumi
In this workshop, we’ll explore the role of artists and creators as tenders of the flames of life, love, hope, truth, and possibility. We’ll offer tools for transmuting despair and remaining connected to your own creative life force in difficult times.
Full description and registration info coming soon
March 8
Choosing the Freedom to Create
If we sit around waiting for someone else to grant us permission to follow our creative life force, we’ll be waiting forever. Granting ourselves the space, time and value of our creativity is a choice we each must make. Come get inspired by models of creative freedom and meet your own personal freedom spirit through a guided imagery practice.
Full description and registration info coming soon
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 2025 workshops.
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.