Leading Transformative Writing Workshops // with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg & Joy Roulier Sawyer

Learn and experience some of the best practices for facilitating transformative writing workshops in your community, school, or college, online or in-person. Not only can leading such workshops bring you immense satisfaction and a means to enhance your livelihood, but it can provide participants with enduring ways to connect with their own voices and visions.

Discover approaches to creating and holding brave and creative spaces in which people can take healthy creative risks, listen more deeply to both each other and their own writing, and craft powerful prose or poetry. We’ll touch on important elements to consider in designing transformative workshops and how to find potential venues and groups for offering your own workshop. We’ll also explore what it means to be a facilitator and do some generative creative writing ourselves!

We’ll also share some information about our Art of Facilitation annual class Sept. 21-Nov. 16.

This workshop is being offered as an event to benefit the TLA Network.

Who this workshop is for:

This workshop is designed to meet you where you are, whether you’re just starting out in facilitation or ready to further develop your facilitation practice. Although this session is 90 minutes long, we’ll be highlighting areas for further investigation to further develop or get started on your facilitation journey.

Format:

We will meet on Zoom and all participants will receive an ample handout beforehand and an audio recording of our session afterwards.

About the Teachers:

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, founder of Transformative Language Arts, has been leading community creative, healing, and social change arts workshops for years, and she has trained and supervised many graduate students in facilitation. She studied meeting facilitation and organizational development through Quaker, bioregional, and grassroots traditions and teachers. Over the last 30 years, she's facilitated hundreds of meetings for groups and businesses and trained dozens of community groups and entrepreneurs. She is the past Kansas Poet Laureate and author of 24 books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. Read more here.

Joy Roulier Sawyer has been facilitating counseling groups, community gatherings, spiritual congregations, and writing workshops since 1995. A retired licensed professional counselor and poetry/journal therapist and supervisor, she now uses her therapeutic expertise to facilitate writing outreaches to those experiencing homelessness, mental health challenges, addiction, and women transitioning out of incarceration. A widely published author and poet, she recently revised and updated the third edition of Biblio/Poetry Therapy: The Interactive Process, a seminal textbook for writing and healing practitioners. Learn more here.