::about

communal change
through individual transformation…

how_aliveAt Writing Ourselves Whole, we’ve learned that writing allows us to restory experiences of trauma and reconnect those parts of ourselves we are trained to hide. Through writing together and offering one another deep generosity and kind witness, we find language for what was never meant to be spoken, and create beauty from the “unspeakable” stuff of our lives.

In these pages, you won’t find the seven-point plan for recovering from trauma, or for becoming a published author. We don’t have a fast track to healing! program. The intention behind these groups is to invite you back into a strong relationship with your own creative genius, your own creative intuition, that wise and curious inner voice that we often become disconnected from during trauma. In any of Writing Ourselves Whole’s generative writing groups, you will be encouraged to try on a practice of writing that allows for a deep attentiveness to one’s creative self. At the end of our time together, whether that’s a single afternoon or eight or nine weeks, you will have an embodied experience of a practice that will nurture and sustain your ongoing creative writing work, whether you continue to participate in our groups or not. These generative writing groups focus on freewriting, deep listening (to self and others), and authentically generous response to new writing.

The vision: Writing Ourselves Whole envisions a world transformed through writing, and each of us who’ve experienced loss and/or trauma encouraged to open our hearts to ourselves and each other, so that we might live in a community of deep expressiveness and self-love, where each individual reaches his and her most complete self.

We deserve a community aware of its full brea(d)th and potential, one that risks speaking truth to power because it has been heard and received by its peers: an empowered community, able to effect change.

To express our own story changes the world. Writing is both memory and possibility at once, and in moving through and with that tension, we create change.

Yes, it’s true. Writing can take you to the things you never thought you’d do, shift you into someone you never believed yourself able to be.