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When I was a kid, whenever I’d ask my dad a complicated question, he would sit back, smile gently, and say: “Do you want the sentence, the paragraph, or the essay?” With homage to Dad, I offer you those three options…
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The Essay:
Where does any story begin? I wrote my first one in grade eight. It was called “Murder on the Train”. As the dot-matrix printer pecked out my dark and stormy words, I realized that I had ripped off the entire plot from Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. It didn’t matter. I was addicted.
The next year, I was enrolled in the creative writing program at a local arts high school, and my world began a slow and steady shift.
High school, for me, was a beautiful stew of creative freedom. I scribbled away in parks and computer rooms, in old farmhouses and on bus trips. I wrote everything imaginable; sonnets about teen angst, short stories about nursing homes, haikus about Hiroshima… There was a road-trip novella in nine parts. There was a sex scene in a cornfield. It wasn’t Pulitzer Prize material, but dear Mr. Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Moore kept reading, nodding, smiling and offering their gentle advice.
What I learned more than anything in those years was that the way I expressed myself with a pen was fundamentally different than the way I expressed myself around the dining-room table, or in chemistry class or with my friends. I learned that the blank page offered a pause between me and the world where I could test waters, try out different paths, and use words in ways that were far truer, wilder and more beautiful than I could in the other contexts of my life. I learned that no matter what was going in inside of me, there was always a way to move it outside.
After high school, I moved out west to study history at UBC, and quickly found myself deep in the oxygen-less space of a purely academic environment. I filled my days with dates and theories, feeling lost. I filled my nights with film and photography classes at local colleges. Oddly, these dim-lit rooms didn’t feel very different from the university. The freedom I had touched in high school was a long way off.
After third year, I attended a filmmaking program at the Gulf Islands Film and Television School. For one month, deep in the old growth of Galiano Island, fifteen of us lived in bunk beds, ate together, and made films at all hours. The combination of wind, good food, and a fiercely caring environment worked its own magic on each of us. One student who hadn’t talked to his father in four years called him up on the pay phone. Another one quit smoking. I felt my heart expand back into its old shape.
It was there that I realized that it wasn’t the product of creativity that mattered to me, it was the process. We were learning much more than apertures, white balances and b-roll. We were learning to become the authors and producers of our own lives. We were learning freer ways to express what was inside us, and how to connect to one another from those places. I began to wonder if I could develop creative spaces of my own.
Over the next year I became the worst dinner-party guest alive. “Hey, since we’re all waiting for the BBQ, why don’t we make a collective poem about these potatoes?” “Um, we have two hours left on this road trip, want to shoot a documentary?” Two schoolteacher friends lent me their classes to teach poetry to. UBC gave me money to help 120 kids at a public school paint murals on the earthquake-supply boxes in their parking lot. Another grant paid for cameras so I could teach photography to “youth-at-risk” in the east side. (Note: this was a term that neither they nor I liked, but it got us the funding.)
It was an explosive year, but I was broke, burnt-out, over-caffeinated and making lattes to pay the bills. Finally I decided that I needed to take this path more seriously. I moved to Toronto to do my Master of Adult Education and Community Development at OISE, U of T.
OISE filled my brain with ideas about facilitation models, theories of creativity, and ideas about the connection between storytelling and community building. I worked with amazing writing facilitators around North America, including Caryn Mirriam-Goldburg and Patricia Lee Lewis. I co-created a workshop on writing and singing with Deanna Yerichuk. Perhaps most importantly, I got started back on my own writing. After many years, I was exploring my own inner world again, getting what was inside outside. It felt amazing.
During this time I held an image, deep in my heart, of small writing workshops in cozy rooms with tea and homemade brownies. Finally, I decided to put up some flyers, and “Memory Threads” was born.
These days, I have been facilitating writing groups full-time for nearly four years. I have a home studio where I run workshops in memoir writing, creative writing, short fiction and poetry. I also work one-on-one with individuals, and have taught workshops in Chile, in BC, and at retreat centers all over rural Ontario.
In case it isn’t clear yet: I love this, I love this, I love this. I love this. I love being witness to creative breakthroughs and deeply personal moments. I love seeing people come back term and after term, marching boldly into their creative worlds. I love the challenge of figuring out what each unique group needs next. I love the feeling after a class when my small home is quiet again, yet full of the rich buzz of creative motion.
I am grateful every day to the people who show up to do this work. I welcome you into this space.
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Want to hear more? Here is an interview I did on Jamie Ridler’s fabulous podcast, Creative Living with Jamie. This podcast presents interviews with creative spirits from around the world. You can listen to the interview by clicking below, or click here to find out more about Jamie’s work.
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