2010 Power of Words Workshop Details
Pre-Conference Workshops
Body Eloquence: Challenge and Transformation – Nancy Mellon
Coyote Medicine Institute – Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy
The Quest and Texts that Guide Us – Gregory Orr
Transformative Narrative Coaching – Yvette Hyater-Adams
Conference Workshops
Catalyst: Finding the Voice of Your Healthy Self – Vanita Leatherwood
The Center for Stories: Help for those Carrying a Storied Burden – Elizabeth Beasley
Community Transformation and the Video Documentary – Valerie Harris
Crazy is Just a Story: Narrative Approaches to Mental Health – Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Dana Waldram
Journeys of the Heart: Coming Home to our Most Authentic Selves – Mary Dowd
Khenuta: An Inner and Outer Sense of Justice – Whendi Broderick
Light Comes: Theatre for the Sustainable Revolution – Sarah Moon
Making Sense of Peace – Geraldine Becker
Memories of You: Healing Journeys Through the Garden of Grief – Paula Dail
Narrative Ecology: Story as Home – Stephanie Wade
Planning for Business/Non-Profits – Lynn O'Connell
Poetic Ritual: From Imagination to Transformation - Travis Poling
ReStorying Health and Disease: Narrative Medicine's Emergence – Dr. Robert Crocker
Reclaiming Your Ancestral Power – S. Pearl Sharp
Reclaiming the Erotic Story: the Liberatory Potential of Writing Desire – Jen Cross
Stand and be Counted: A Poetic Reimagination of the World – Sha Cage
Story Telling the Healer – Osese Tuti
The Transformative Process of Creative Collaboration – Maria Johnson
Weaving Dreams into Being Through Words and Objects – Karen Ogg & Jan Hitchcock
Post-Conference Workshops
Conversing With Your Calling: Your Work, Livelihood, and Life – Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
Fundraising Basics – Lynn O'Connell
Making the Leap: Knowing When You Are Ready – Scott Youmans
Speaking the Soul: The Transformative Power of Poetry – Kim Rosen
Pre-Conference Workshops
Body Eloquence: Challenge and Transformation – Nancy Mellon
Stories can support us on every level, awakening our creative courage and vision. Explore the dynamics of resilience, and how stories support the need of both children and adults to survive challenges and to thrive. This is an opportunity to nourish your imagination and creative confidence as you discover the resonances between human physiology and plot lines and story characters that express the immune system in action. This workshop offers vital new perspectives for health practitioners, parents, teachers,creative artists–and all who love stories.
Coyote Medicine Institute – Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy
Narrative ideas are catching hold! Narrative ideas combine contemporary neuroscience with indigenous wisdom with feminist and ethnic studies and with our ordinary understanding of how human beings work. In this pre-conference workshop, we will explore how to "narrativize" your practice and work. How do you understand the concepts of story and how stories are embodied and how stories live through us, live us, and catch us up in living through them in the form of the roles that we play in those stories. How do we understand stories as the organizing principle for how our brains actually work. We will focus on the experiential – on how to work with story in a variety of contexts including psychotherapy, medicine, nursing, counseling, education, and creative arts therapy. We will use some drama therapy techniques to explore how we embody the stories into which we are born. Participants will leave this workshop with an awareness of how to move forward and into this exciting paradigm shift in medicine and psychology.
Barbara and Lewis are both affiliated with the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation. Lewis is Director of its Center for Narrative Studies and Barb is the Director of Creative Arts Therapies. Coyote is based in South Burlington, Vermont.
Lewis, MD, PhD, is the author of the "Coyote" Trilogy. His work discusses healing practices from Lakota, Cherokee and Cree traditions, and how they intersect with conventional medicine via a social constructionist model. He has been writing about the use of imagery and narrative in healing since the 1980s and is is certified in psychiatry, geriatrics, and family medicine. His research collaborations include work on various psychological conditions, issues of psychology during birthing, nutritional approaches to autism and diabetes, and the use of healing circles to improve overall health outcomes.
Barbara, MFA, MA, is Creative Arts Director for the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation, and is involved with their Center for Psychosis Studies. She is a filmmaker and a visual artist and is currently editing a film on how society decides whom to call "mad". Her M.A. is in Creative Arts Therapies with an emphasis on Drama Therapy. She is the author of scholarly papers on embodied narratives and drama therapy with autism and schizophrenia.
The Quest and Texts that Guide Us – Gregory Orr
“Make your own bibles!” Emerson urged us, who had in mind that we, as individuals, should take charge of our own spiritual destinies. But what did he mean? For what purpose should we make our own personal sacred text? How should we go about it? What might it contain? We’ll talk about these topics, especially as regards the art of words as a matter of Craft and a matter of Quest. As writers, we study and learn craft. As humans, we would do well to consider quest just as seriously. One thing we might each want to take with us on our quest: “our own bible.” In this workshop, we’ll explore the theme of “bibles” and the theme of personal quests in the light of our roles as creative people.
Gregory is considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse, is the author of nine collections of poetry. His most recent books are Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved and How Beautiful The Beloved. He is also the author of the astonishing memoir, The Blessing, and an extended meditation on the power of poetry, Poetry as Survival. He has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence.
Transformative Narrative Coaching – Yvette Hyater-Adams
Ready to try something creative and new? Yvette A. Hyater-Adams, a pioneer in the Transformative Language Arts movement, is offering a literary arts-based approach to personal and professional development with Transformative Narrative Coaching. Be guided to write short autobiographical and imaginative narratives integrated into a coaching model. The process increases self-awareness and helps individuals make mindful choices. With support of workshop participants, write and share written work as a way to have witnessed your powerful story for change. Experience a coaching process used successfully in executive development programs, for women in transition, and for anyone who wants to explore and expand career and life choices.
Yvette is a Masters graduate the the Goddard TLA program, and is a writer, consultant and Transformative Language Arts practitioner who founded Renaissance Muse, offering writing workshops, executive and personal effectiveness coaching teaching individuals how to shape their experiences into transformative stories. She also has founded Transformative Narrative Coaching. This former bank-executive-recovered-artist is an accomplished organization development and diversity consultant, working with CEOs to find ways to unleash the power of silenced voices within their organizations.
Conference Workshops
Catalyst: Finding the Voice of Your Healthy Self – Vanita Leatherwood
In the Catalyst: Finding the Voice of Your Healthy Self workshop participants will experience and learn how transformative language arts is being used to promote healthy lifestyle changes particularly within communities in which health disparities are known to exist. Using writing, music and other creative activities (as well as sharing with others) participants will experience and learn skills that lead to nutritious eating, evoke the relaxation response,create energy, enhance mood and build resiliency. The workshop is appropriate for anyone aspiring to live a healthier life and/or who conducts programs for populations at risk according to health indicators including, physical activity, tobacco use, mental health, injury and violence, and environmental quality.
Vanita is founder of Living Well Workshops, a writer and activist who believes in working in unison to make poetry political, a transformative art, and a great tool toward action. Through Living Well, she offers workshops integrating expressive and creative writing; painting, coloring and collage making; stress relief techniques; music, movement and play; and journaling techniques.
The Center for Stories: Help for those Carrying a Storied Burden – Elizabeth Beasley
As a hospital chaplain, it became obvious to me that health care professionals carry a huge "burden" of stories. This workshop will showcase a methodology of shared storytelling and group response, developed by Cameron Plagens, PhD., which is specifically designed to help integrate and "soften" the experiences of those in the helping professions. Using words, art, poetry and a trained facilitator, individuals will have an opportunity to explore their "story world" in a supportive and integrative environment.
Community Transformation and the Video Documentary – Valerie Harris
Celebrate the spirit of community through narrative storytelling and the medium of video documentary. Get inspired to use oral histories, vintage photographs, newspaper articles and accessible media tools to document the extraordinary in the lives of ordinary people, creating work that is both art and testimony.
Valerie Harris is a writer, teacher and producer of literary and video media. Much of her work is dedicated to assisting individuals in seeing themselves as active participants in the cultural landscape of their communities. Valerie has developed a number of community projects related to art, women, and the African-American community, and has received numerous grants in support of her work. A presenter at the 2008 TLA conference, Valerie teaches creative writing in Philadelphia.
Crazy is Just a Story: Narrative Approaches to Mental Health – Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Dana Waldram
We all have moments in our lives that we never forget, moments of great joy or sorrow, fear or courage. These moments, not our credentials or careers, are the true story of our lives, the underground river, flowing through us, beneath the day to day. Using guided meditation, journaling and poetry, we will begin to chart our heart's voyage, and learn how to listen to our hearts everyday.
In this workshop we will present parallel views to those presented in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Standardizations Manual (DSM) that are based upon narrative ideas and are more compatible with current findings of neuroscience. We will show how the brain is designed to function as an organ of story comprehension and construction which is both the default mode of brain function and the very best way to store and retrieve information. We will build upon indigenous views that all of life is a story and that we embody our story as we perform it in the world to suggest that narrative provides a better understanding for mental suffering and pain than does DSM and that the narrative of a person's life supports neuroimaging findings much better than does the somewhat arbitrary and socially constructed categories of DSM. We will explore what counseling practice would look like if DSM were abandoned in favor of story.
Dr. Dana Waldram is a medical anthropologist and is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. She is also an accomplished visual artists whose paintings have been displayed throughout Vermont. She has been teaching residents and medical students using narrative ideas and about narrative ideas for some time.
Lewis, MD, PhD, is the author of the "Coyote" Trilogy. His work discusses healing practices from Lakota, Cherokee and Cree traditions, and how they intersect with conventional medicine via a social constructionist model. He has been writing about the use of imagery and narrative in healing since the 1980s and is is certified in psychiatry, geriatrics, and family medicine. His research collaborations include work on various psychological conditions, issues of psychology during birthing, nutritional approaches to autism and diabetes, and the use of healing circles to improve overall health outcomes.
Journeys of the Heart: Coming Home to our Most Authentic Selves – Mary Dowd
We all have moments in our lives that we never forget, moments of great joy or sorrow, fear or courage. These moments, not our credentials or careers, are the true story of our lives, the underground river, flowing through us, beneath the day to day. Using guided meditation, journaling and poetry, we will begin to chart our heart's voyage, and learn how to listen to our hearts everyday.
Khenuta: An Inner and Outer Sense of Justice – Whendi Broderick
Khenuta is an Aramaic word meaning, “an inner and outer sense of justice among different voices we feel within and the reflection of these voices in society.” In this experiential workshop we’ll explore images and words as we consider the role of language in the construction of meaning and identity.
Whendi Cook Broderick, Ph.D. is an emancipatory action researcher whose work integrates popular education, creative arts, outdoor education and service learning as a critical intervention for libratory learning. Whendi’s music, visual art and workshops facilitate the potential for cultural change. Her Khenuta Project is a community outreach initiative that develops consciousness about language and the social construction of meaning. She directs a Masters of Arts program in Oral Traditions at The Graduate Institute in Connecticut.
Light Comes: Theatre for the Sustainable Revolution – Sarah Moon
This workshop will benefit writers and dramatic artists who would like to develop and currently are developing work toward social transformation. The playwright will discuss the ideological inspiration, research and development process for Light Comes, a play that follows the journey of a young woman seeking to preserve her homeland from the destruction of mountain top removal. The workshop will close with a live scene portrayed by actors.
Sarah Moon is a theatre artist and educator committed to promoting environmental sustainability. She received a BA in Theatre with Honors from the University of Puget Sound in 2000. In 2004, she received an MFA in playwriting from Brandeis University where her play Losing the Game won the Steinberg Prize for Best Original Play. While living in New York, she co-founded the New York Loves Mountains campaign, using arts and activism to bring awareness to New Yorkers of the issue of mountain top removal coal mining. Her plays have been produced in Boston, New York and Washington D.C. Currently, she teaches writing at Cape Cod Community College and Plymouth Arts Guild.
Making Sense of Peace – Geraldine Becker
With narrative response as a springboard we will explore the powerful concept of peace, using each of our senses—including “imagination” or intuition—encouraging curiosity and wonder. We’ll discuss what may prevent us from finding “peace” in our lives and share tools and techniques to foster and further promote peace.
Memories of You: Healing Journeys Through the Garden of Grief – Paula Dail
This workshop invites partcipants to engage the gried experience as a spiritual exercise. By careully reflecting on the use of words to facilitate the grief process, an opportunityy for deep personal transformation, which is the essential prelude to wider social transformation, can occur.
Bill Ladewig is an award-winning writer, publisher, and practicing attorney who has guided many people through the legal minefields and grief processes associated with the death of a loved one. His short stoy "Kate" won the 2008 Wisconsin Writers Association First Prize.
Paula Dail is an Emerita research professor of social policy, award-winning playwright, and novelist. He script "Choices," won a 2004 National Telly Award. Two of her plays and novels deal with death and the grieving process, and one is currently under consideration for a film adaptation.
Narrative Ecology: Story as Home – Stephanie Wade
Via a generative mapping exercise, we will begin to fashion rich, placed-based narratives and we will begin to raise questions about ecological literacy. If participants agree, we may continue to pursue this topic through a blog, an electronic ecology where we can support each other’s efforts to live in harmony.
Planning for Business/Non-Profits – Lynn O'Connell
Lynn O’Connell has more than 20 years of experience in fundraising for the nonprofit sector and has served in diverse roles including those of nonprofit staff, consultant, trainer and board trustee. Currently, Lynn is executive director of Computer C.O.R.E. in Alexandria, VA. Previously, she served as executive director of a national healthcare foundation, and before that she was vice president for another foundation. Most of her previous work in the sector had focused on fundraising, grant writing and nonprofit management.
Playing with Crazy: Using Creative Arts Therapies with Psychotic People – Barbara Mainguy and Lewis Mehl-Madrona
This workshop explores embodied narrative approaches to healing psychosis. We explore briefly some narrative and cross-cultural views of psychosis and then show how the person living these extraordinary experiences can be helped to contain them through narrative. We show how dramatic arts techniques coupled with narrative can be used to give bodies to voices and to perform voices in public forums for audiences in ways that make the voices manageable and contained, leading toward healing of the suffering that came from their presence. We talk about how language arts professionals can learn how to do this work.
Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, PhD, is board certified in family medicine, geriatric medicine, and psychiatry, and is also a clinical psychologist. He has a post-graduate diploma in narrative studies from Massey University, New Zealand. He is Director of Coyote Institute's Center for Narrative Studies and is the author of three Coyote books on indigenous healing and two narrative books (Narrative Medicine and Narrative Psychiatry. He is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Hawaii.
Barbara Mainguy, MFA, MA, is Creative Arts Director for the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation, and is involved with their Center for Psychosis Studies. She is a filmmaker and a visual artist and is currently editing a film on how society decides whom to call "mad". Her M.A. is in Creative Arts Therapies with an emphasis on Drama Therapy. She is the author of scholarly papers on embodied narratives and drama therapy with autism and schizophrenia.
Poetic Ritual: From Imagination to Transformation - Travis Poling
The poet's voice can engage our imagination to bring us into communion with spiritual forces of liberation, and ultimately toward transformation of our world. With attention to poetic language, ritual can impact our world for the better. Indeed, poetic ritual may be the only thing that can truly save us.
Restorying Health and Disease: the Emergence of Narrative Medicine – Dr. Robert Crocker
The beginnings of a paradigm shift are occuring in contemporary medicine in which we are rediscovering the importance of history and story in the healing process. Through the efforts of social constructionists and cross-cultural studies, we are coming to understand that cultures invent stories about health and disease and then form filters to confirm those stories and ignore conflicting evidence. Biomedicine has dominated these stories, but other minority stories are growing stronger, such as those of China (traditional Chinese Medicine), India (Ayurvedic Medicine), and North America (Native American healing). In this workshop, we explore this new paradigm, its implications, and how language arts professionals can work alongside and with health care professionals to further patient care, including the use of language arts to elicit more fully the patients' story, the assistance to physicians in the art of medical narrative writing, and the assistance to patients in expressing themselves, their suffering, and their healing for therapeutic benefits.
Dr. Crocker is a board-certified family physician and is Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Arizona's Center for Integrative Medicine (Dr. Andrew Weil's program). He teaches narrative medicine to fellows, medical students, and residents, and is also the President of the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation (S. Burlington, Vermont). He has an extensive background in health care funding and the funding of alternative medical services.
Reclaiming Your Ancestral Power – S. Pearl Sharp
An experience with spirituality that explores our connection with our ancestors — a potentpower that may be dormant, ignored, feared. An interactive workshop, participants clarify this power as a process, create an ancestral altar, and identify personal homework necessary to revitalize the ancestral connection and to restore balance in relationships.
S. Pearl merges art, spirituality and creativity in literary readings, film screenings
and the workshops, “The Writer’s Dance Class” and “Writing Wellness." More about S. Pearl can be found at www.waterfromthewell.net
Reclaiming the Erotic Story: the Liberatory Potential of Writing Desire – Jen Cross
Can erotic writing liberate more than our libidos? Does greater comfort with sexual expression lead to greater agency in our communities? In this workshop, we’ll write together, and consider how empowering a more expansive relationship with sexual identity and desire affects our social change/organizing work in the world.
Stand and be Counted: A Poetic Reimagination of the World – Sha Cage and E.G. Bailey
Paulo Freire says 'Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.' 'WRITE ON' is an interactive yet provocative-writing based workshop that challenges participants to analyze then poetically re-imagine (a transformation of) the world we live in …utilizing discussion, writing, and theater activities. Special attention is given to issues facing youth, and empowerment/dis-empowerment of communities of color.
Dynamic performers, Directors of the MN Spoken Word Association, published poets, radio personalities, and award winning artists; Bailey and Cage's work has taken them on travels through the U.S., England, South Africa, France, Serbia, West Africa, The Netherlands, Canada, and beyond. They have been featured in films, commercials, plays, and on the B.E.T. image awards. Together they were instrumental in founding the Hip Hop studies minor at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, as well as founding the National Spoken Word Coalition and the Hip Hop and Spoken Word Institute based in Minneapolis 'In Da Tradition'. They lecture, perform, and teach workshops nationally and internationally and are currently teaching a Spoken Word Performance/Theater course at the University of MN. Their work and philosophy centers around issues of home, liberation, equality, and activism.
Story Telling the Healer – Osese Tuti
Storytelling in African society in Kenya and in luo society was a powerful tool for entertainment and information dissemination. With the coming of community theater, story telling has evolved into an educational tool providing interactive outlets for actors to address various social problems like HIV/aids, community violence, and the creation of peace amongst communities. Using the the African concept of involving your audience through the use of songs and drums, this workshop is a sharing of my experiences in Africa and is hence a journey back to the future that helps create story from what we were, are, and will be.
Since completion of Kenyan high school in 1994, I have been involved in community theater and trainings as a participant,trainer,actor and director. I have produced stories for organizations and performed in conferences in our local scenarios. I am currently the composer and storyteller of mbelewe afrika, a traditional music and arts performing group.
The Transformative Process of Creative Collaboration – Maria Johnson and Diana Tigerlily
Inspired by our creative collaboration involving music, poetry, improvisation, drawing, free-writing, and movement/dance, this workshop will involve sharing aspects of our process and experience, as well as creating a safe welcoming space for participants to engage in the creative collaborative process within the group context of the workshop itself.
Weaving Dreams into Being Through Words and Objects – Karen Ogg & Jan Hitchcock
This workshop demonstrates a curricular thread on Dreams for alternative high school English/Art classrooms. Engaging with inventive but practical art and writing classroom applications, students explore dreams as sleep phenomena and as a metaphoric vehicle for articulating possibilities they can imagine for themselves, their places in society, and society itself.
Post-Conference Workshops
Conversing With Your Calling: Your Work, Livelihood, and Life – Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
What work is calling to us, how do we make a living doing what we love, and how can we balance our life's work with our life? Come explore how to follow and converse with the signs and wonders that illuminate next steps to take in work, livelihood and life through starting a callings/livelihood journal of writing and art as well as other artistic and spiritual practices. This workshop welcomes people wanting to re-energize their current work as well as start new work.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, PhD is the poet laureate of Kansas and the founder of Transformative Language Arts in Goddard College's Individualized MA Program. She is the author of 10 books, including a recently published memoir, The Sky Begins At Your Feet, and a new collection of poetry, Landed. She leads writing and right livelihood workshops widely, and with singer Kelley Hunt, co-writes songs, collaboratively performs and leads Brave Voice writing and singing retreats. Her personal homepage is CarynMirriamGoldberg.com.
Fundraising Basics – Lynn O'Connel
One of the first questions and sometimes most confusing faced by new or small nonprofit organizations is…how do we get money to do what we do. The answer is fundraising, and the good news is that there are many different ways to raise that money you need! During this session, learn the different methods, the advantages and disadvantages of each – and strategies for you to use to get the best results!
Lynn O’Connell has more than 20 years of experience in fundraising for the nonprofit sector and has served in diverse roles including those of nonprofit staff, consultant, trainer and board trustee. Currently, Lynn is executive director of Computer C.O.R.E. in Alexandria, VA. Previously, she served as executive director of a national healthcare foundation, and before that she was vice president for another foundation. Most of her previous work in the sector had focused on fundraising, grant writing and nonprofit management.
Making the Leap: Knowing When You Are Ready – Scott Youmans
As we prepare to leap back into our daily lives, take time to reflect on what has awoken inside you during this sacred weekend and consider how to bring your vision more fully alive in the coming months. Share stories of inspiration and transition, clarify where you are now and where you want to go and offer your own wisdom to those considering a leap in their lives. This session will include facilitated discussion, visualization and group exercises. Participants will be encouraged to make a commitment to themselves around pursuing their own right livelihood. To help steady us as we leap toward our vision, opportunities for support and connection beyond the conference will be offered.
Speaking the Soul: The Transformative Power of Poetry – Kim Rosen
Author of Saved by a Poem, Kim Rosen combines her experience as a poet, spoken word artist, therapist and spiritual teacher to create a magical environment in which poetry becomes a healing medicine for the body, mind, heart and soul. Experience a meditative mix of spoken poems, guidance, music and writing that can liberate the source of creativity within. Discover that every poem has a “medicine bag” of tools for changing consciousness and melting the veils between worlds. Learn poetry by heart with ease and joy: Learning by heart is completely different from memorizing. Free your real voice: Discover how to authentically speak a poem (or any other communication of truth) by releasing the patterns, preferences and fears that confine your voice. Discover poetry as sacrament: A spoken poem has the power to create a holy space where all are harmonized and healed. Prior knowledge of poetry or writing is not necessary (nor is the capacity to “memorize” anything!)
Kim Rosen has touched thousands with poetry’s power to awaken, inspire, and heal. She reveals, through an elegant weaving of spoken poems, insight and music, that poetry is a necessary medicine for our world: a companion through difficulty, a guide when we are lost, a salve when we are wounded, and a direct conduit to an inner source of joy, freedom and insight. Author of Saved by a Poem, Kim Rosen combines her experience as a poet, spoken word artist, therapist and spiritual teacher to create a magical environment in which poetry becomes a healing medicine for the body, mind, heart and soul. This an invitation to rediscover what mystics, poets and shamans have known for centuries: in the rhythms and silence of the language of the soul, the mind bursts open to an unsayable “Aha!” of pure wonder.
