Writing for Transformation For Yourself & Your Community // with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Explore the roots, branches, and blossoms of writing for change

In this special fundraising workshop for the TLA Network, we'll explore the roots, branches, and blossoms of writing for change, including what TLA and its focus on transformative writing can bring to our lives, communities, and world.

This hands-on workshop – with writing prompts for you and your communities – welcomes all voices, beginners and newcomers to transformative writing as well as old hats, whether you’re focused on your own writing practice, facilitating workshops and projects with others, or all of the above.

We’ll romp through what transformative writing is and can be, whether practiced solo or in groups, and along with that, a bit about how TLA came to be and is sending up shoots of new growth in many surprising places places around the world. We’ll also focus on claiming and naming for ourselves what transformative writing may encompass. 

Along the way, we’ll experience some writing, meditation, and listening prompts to connect with more of our own words and the space in between them that also holds wisdom. We’ll close with writing into our individual and community callings ready to unfold over the next year.

Come learn more about:

• The diversity of ways transformative writing can bring meaning to us individually and collectively as well as the importance of naming and claiming what we mean by terms such as healing, transformation, growth, and liberation.
• TLA’s story from roots to branches to blossoms and how you’re part of it.
• What we sense and experience as possibilities and callings for TLA and transformative writing in our lives, communities, and world now.
• Some ground rules and practices to consider and/or develop in how you embody and practice transformative writing.
• Ways to use transformative writing to clarify your touchstone for revisiting your callings and setting goals.

We’ll also learn more about how TLA started and how it’s going in our lives while finding many convergences of joy, humor, and meaning together.

What People Are Saying About Learning With Caryn

Beyond being detailed, caring, and brilliant in her editing, teaching, and consulting work, there is something about Caryn’s warm, authentic, empowering, Inspiring, and joyful presence that I have rarely observed in other leaders. – Harriet Lerner

After each class I recognize the peaceful place the class creates in me. My response to listening to others and hearing your responses to our work fills me with contentment, joy ,and satisfaction. The level of trust that we experience opens us to heartfelt honesty even as deeply painful experiences are shared.  Thank you for the sparks your words create. –  Patricia Durkin

Caryn’s skill, talent, wit, and wisdom have shown me the way to begin writing again, which is a restorative healing process. Caryn has taught me to reach deep within and unabashedly, without apology or shame, to tell my own story.  - Julie Flora

Who Should Attend?

All are welcome! This workshop would benefit anyone wanting to understand more about the possibilities and callings of transformative writing in our time as we share its history, reach, and future. At the same time, this workshop can help you as a writer and seeker create with greater abandon, awareness, and vision. You are welcome, whether you are a new or seasoned writer, spoken word artist, storyteller, musician, facilitator, educator, healer or health professional, or other kind of change-maker.

Format

This class will be presented Saturday, January 17, 2026 from 3-5PM ET/ 2-4 PM CT/ 1-3 PM MT/ 12-2PM PT / 8-10 PM UTC as a one-time, two-hour Zoom session. The day after class a recording, as well as notes and resources from the class, will be emailed to class members only. 

Your Registration Fee is a Donation

Because this event is so generously being offered by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg as a fundraiser, your entire registration fee will go directly to support scholarships, program development, and other offerings meant to expand and enrich our community. You will be helping programs like:

• Power of Words Scholarship Fund
• Online Class Scholarship Fund
• The Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Fund (conference and online class support for both BIPOC people and people who are living with serious illness and/or disabilities.)
• Our free and open to all Community Circles and Virtual Salons

Registration Levels:

• Level I – $200.00
• Level II – $150.00
• Level III – $75.00
• Level IV – $50.00

We thank you. 

About the Facilitator

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, PhD is the founder of Transformative Language Arts, the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 25 books, including the recent The Magic Eye: A Story of Saving a Life and a Place in the Age of Anxiety, and How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam's Well, a novel. A beloved writing workshop facilitator and writing and Right Livelihood coach, she offers writing workshops widely, particularly for people living with serious illness, adults in transition, humans looking for greater connection with the earth, and poets and writers seeking their most courageous voice on the page and in their lives. She offers the weekly “Write Where You Are” through her Patreon page, and her long-time blog is “Everyday Magic” at CarynMirriamGoldberg.com. 

Born hard-wired to make something (in art, music, and especially writing), Caryn’s long-time callings include writing as a spiritual and ecological path, yoga, cultivating a loving marriage, family, and community, and helping herself and others make and take leaps into the miraculous work of their lives. She lives in the country on land she and her husband, ecological writer Ken Lassman, have put in a conservation reserve and are restoring as prairie and woodlands.