New and Favourite Workshops
Team Writing Retreat, Muskoka Ontario
Through poetry and expressive writing workshops, people can come together, wherever they’re sitting. To listen, reflect, and make connections.
Poetry cuts to the chase. Like scent, it goes right to the core. With this immediacy, it’s a potent tool for allowing people to write and be inspired by language and concerns relevant to their lives. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” said Emily Dickinson.
Here are five workshops that can be brought to workplaces, schools, and communities of all kinds.
Awake at Work — Writing into Presence
Use writing to explore how simply showing up and attending to your own experience is the starting point for attending to others. Through guided exercises, you'll have the opportunity to notice your personal, professional, and physical responses –– whether you're at a desk at home, in an office, or on the front line –– and to write about them in a reflective, open, non-evaluative way.
1.5 hours. No experience necessary.
Leap Before You Look: A Writing Workshop in Creativity and Risk-Taking
When you come to the open-ended end of things -- the job, the relationship, the place you've lived in -- how much can be planned, how much can be known? In this workshop, explore the meeting place of planning and chaos, risk and creativity. Take this hour and a half with other people and, through writing and poetry, leap or stumble into the next unknown.
1.5 hours. No experience necessary.
Be Good to Yourself, Whoever You Are
Often in work and in life, energy moves quickly towards projects and other people but there’s little left for your own restoration. In this workshop, through the use of poems and prompts, you will be nudged into writing and reflecting about what sustains you, what you love and what you need. Take this hour for yourself as a flicker of possibility of how you might take time for yourself in general.
1-1.5 hours. A much requested workshop this year as it addresses self-care.
Grief, Gratitude, and Meditative Awareness: A Reflective Writing Session
When we talk about being grateful, it sometimes feels like an attempt to override the grief we are also living with. Like telling ourselves to eat our peas because they're good for us, a finger wagging into appreciation. But why is gratitude useful, and how can we experience it while feeling the pain around us and within us? This session uses poetry, conversation, and a meditation practice to tap into the well-being gratitude can sometimes offer, even now.
1.5 hours. No experience necessary.
Postcards from the Edge: Addressing Compassion Fatigue in Note Form
A writing workshop for Health Care Professionals, Residents, and Caregivers
Perhaps you are too overwhelmed to read this. Let’s be brief: this workshop will address the impacts on you as front line workers, health professionals and caregivers of caring for human suffering. In notes. A creative writing workshop. With other hesitant people. Using poems as guides. Have a rest; write something. No experience necessary.
1.5 hours.
