Fishtrap Presents: Virtual Cultivating Resilience When Writing About Trauma

Cultivating Resilience When Writing About Trauma - An Online Workshop With Justin Hocking

How might a regular writing practice help us recover from trauma? What techniques can we use to regulate our own nervous systems when writing about emotionally charged material? And, when writing for a wider audience, how do we transform traumatic experiences into art, while taking care not to overwhelm our readers? To address these and other questions, this workshop will explore healing methods based on the relatively new field of Narrative Therapy and contemporary body-focused psychology. Via a series of gentle writing prompts, we’ll also experiment with sensory grounding, perspective shifting, intentional choreography of various levels of intimacy and distance, and “medicine stories.” Though we’ll focus largely on narrative nonfiction, we’ll also investigate how these techniques can be employed across various genres, including poetry and fiction.