Listing: one more of the tricks of the “trade”

AHN logo - spiraling us together!I had such a great experience writing in response to the Arts and Healing network interview questions over the last several months — and I was also, finally, motivated to regularly update this blog.

So, at 6:30am while I was working on my morning pages, I jotted down some more questions I’d like to answer (or begin to answer!) about my work, the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops, the uses of art, and more…

It ends up tricking me into posting more regularly — we’ve got to do what we determine will work to get us around our blocks and internalized naysayers, don’t we?

So, here are some of the questions I’d love to explore in more depth:

  • Why don’t I call what I’m doing ‘therapy’?
  • How do silences/silencings in one area of our lives affect the rest of our lives?
  • What’s the psychological/social effect of transformative writing in community?
  • How does trauma change the way we “know” things, and then how does art both accommodate and help to reshape that new knowledge/way of knowing (ontology?)
  • How do we get started with transformative writing?
  • What does art, experiencing and creating art, do to our brains?
  • Why would anyone want to write about sex in a group of strangers?
  • What do people who’ve been in the Writing Ourselves Whole workshops have to say about them?
  • What’s the difference, psychologically/neurologically, between the creation of visual and verbal art?
  • How can writing be a spiritual practice? What’s our definition of “spiritual practice”? Does it need to be a spiritual practice? Can writing ever not be spiritual?
  • Reconsidering ‘recovery’ – tangling with the voice that says, “I want to get back to where/who I was before this happened.”

    These are some of the questions tickling the inside of my brain these days, and getting them out there in front of you provides me with some more impetus to actually tackle them.

    I’ve had a lot of my old cognitive science interests re-emerging recently, in particular around the neurophysiology and social/sociological effects of trauma and of trauma recovery through transformative writing (in particular — though any expressive art, in general).

    What about you? What questions do you have about the writing experience, about expressive or healing arts, about Pat Schneider’s Amherst Writers and Artists writing workshop method, about erotic writing, or…? Please let me know — and we can add them to the list!

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