WRITING

W r i t i n g

On this page you'll find valuable inspiration for your writing.
To start with, here is the abstract for the workshop the three of us held at the EAGT Conference in Stockholm, with some minor adaptations to this forum:

"Our Write to Re-member: Reconnecting with our Inner Writer, Poet, and Storyteller"

To express what is in our hearts and in our minds is a need that is present for all of us from our first moments in the world. As babies we use our cries, then our expressions, words, and gestures to make ourselves known to those around us. We are still quite young when we begin to draw, to sing, to dance, and we are eager for others to see our productions. Once we begin to write, a reflective element can enter our expressiveness. As young children in school we are seen chewing on our pencils as we go through our minds looking for the words we want. As teens we may have sat dreamily with journals on our laps, trying to express our most intimate thoughts in prose or poems. We may have written birthday cards to our parents, love poems to girlfriends/boyfriends, passed notes in class. In these earliest efforts we found our own passionate forms of self-expression, the forms through which we reveal our inner realm to ourselves, and then to others if we choose. We used means other than speech because much of that which deeply touches the core of our being leaves us speechless. Our developing mode of expression became the means though which we could rearrange our thoughts gently, emerging with a piece of work that expresses our selves and our experience more poignantly than talking. And then we had the creativity itself, the playfulness and joy that came with the act of expression. We did these things with no thought of whether the writing, poem or story was good or bad, and so we could be fully ourselves in the expression.

What a lovely image, and yet for most of us it is but a distant memory. For most of us the critic steps in and we learn to become self-conscious, to judge our writing in terms of whether it is "good" or "bad" rather than whether it truly expresses our being. For many of us this process is so traumatic, so shaming, that our courage to step forward becomes greatly diminished or even destroyed. Not only is this destructive to us, to our wholeness, but it erodes our communion with one another. If we do not feel free to reveal who we are by full expression in whatever form is comfortable, how can we ever know what is in each other's hearts?

Our workshop seeks to water the seeds of expressive writing that exist in all of us. We invite participants to remember who we are and who we have forgotten ourselves to be; to make ourselves whole again by recovering that lost artist who once expressed him/herself fully, unselfconsciously; to heal our fragmentation and bring back our creativity. We may yet become masters of the written word, poets, storytellers. At the very least we can express ourselves fully to one another, to create a community based on inclusion, allowing inspiration to flourish.

We plan an experiential workshop in which we invite participants to remember a time when they could express themselves freely, then to remember an event that began the shaming, the silencing, the shutting down. We will ask what it would have taken then to keep from being destroyed by this experience, to have allowed the free and expressive self to survive. Participants will share this in the group as a whole, and we will invite the group to support the reemergence of each participant. The small group within the workshop becomes a small community where we can explore how the use of writing, now and in the future, may help us re-member ourselves.

Our intention is that these workshops will provide an arena for Gestalt practitioners to connect through self-expression and thus link us to a worldwide Gestalt community. We hope to continue the experiment begun at the EAGT Conference in Stockholm 2001 in exploring the writer, the poet and the storyteller from the possibility of Inclusion, Inspiration and Community.
New Zealand and then Florida will see Our Write to Remember presented again.

Our vision is to build a bridge. A bridge where dreams, thoughts, promises, ideas, hopes, tears and laughter can be carried safely to the four corners of the world on the wings of our words.
We invite you to contribute to Freedom X-Press.

Warmly,
Sharon, Lars and Elizabeth.

Editors:
Sharon Snir, Australia
Elizabeth Revell, USA
Lars Berg, Sweden