Word Sauce
Very supportive e-courses for people who love to write, long to write or want to write more.
Come and join me in a supportive and fun environment. Kick-start your creativity, let go of unhelpful stories and beliefs and explore personal themes from your life. On the way, remember and reconnect with who you really feel you are or might become rather than who you think you should or ought to be.
Word Sauce 1: Letting Go – 8 weeks
Next course starts: 21 Feb 2011
Word Sauce 2: Making and Being Remade – 8 weeks
Next course starts: 2 May 2011
Join the writing for wellbeing community and/or download a course outline at www.wordsauce.com
My Word Sauce story
I’ve always loved to make things with words. As a little girl, I made miniature books of poems and stories (an idea I probably stole from the Bronte sisters, who figured prominently in my early imaginative life).
I devoured other people’s books. I filled my dolls’ pram with books and I always had a book in my bag or under my pillow or even propped behind the taps when I was cleaning my teeth.
Somehow, along the way, I learned to stop making stories and poems. I learned how not to honour my impulse to make things with words. Somehow a part of me got squashed, crushed. I learned that telling stories was silly and writing poems was deeply uncool. As a student of English at a ‘top university,’ I still harboured the dream of a living a writer’s life – bur privately, secretly, apologetically. Because writing really had nothing to do with getting a First or making a living.
After graduating, I dabbled with advertising and then PR for not-for-profits. I ended up in the training department of Reuters, the international news agency. I drifted in a kind of trance through my London life and I never really did anything about my dream – because my desire to write seemed a little adolescent, even indulgent. I had bills to pay every month, for goodness’ sake.
Not surprisingly, something was missing in all of this. Something didn’t feel right.
In 2000, at the dawn of a new millennium, I started to wake up. I signed-up for a part-time postgrad course at the University of Sussex with Celia Hunt, who has been pioneering research into writing in personal development, education and health care for the past twenty years. Celia is interested in the links between writing and living, between telling our stories and healing ourselves. That felt like something useful. That felt like something I could engage with and justify to myself.
I met amazing people on that course who continue to be my friends today. One of them, the playwright Sonja Linden, introduced me to her writing group at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and I went on to work as a volunteer ‘writing mentor’ with clients of the Foundation, helping many brave and inspiring people to process their painful experiences through writing.
I even ran a few writing workshops at Reuters. And people – very busy and stressed and high-flying business people – came to those workshops and wrote and shared their writing and reconnected with something that seemed powerful and significant for them. And that began to convince me that there is something vitally important for many people about having a certain kind of supportive space in which to write.
In the meantime, I was finding my own writing flow. I wrote and wrote and wrote. And I began to reconnect with and listen to how I really felt about myself and my life and the world (rather than what I thought I should or ought to be doing).
In 2002, I went back to university full-time to complete my doctoral research with Celia. I looked for evidence to back-up my hunches about writing and all the things I’d observed from my own experiences and those of the people I’d worked with, drawing on theory from positive psychology, therapy, neuroscience and cognitive science.
I developed a model for writing in personal development, therapy and health care that I’ve now shared with hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people.
I wrote and wrote and wrote some more. I won a place on a poetry mentoring scheme and began to publish my poems in journals and magazines. I left London, followed my heart to Canada and then back to my native Yorkshire, trained as a therapist and set up a private practice.
Today, I run the Word Sauce e-courses and community because I want to share the process that continues to help me to find my flow, stay unstuck and build a fulfilling, creative life that is rich and nurturing in so many ways.
I continue to use writing with my private clients.
I love to help people to uncover their personal truths, the truths that are really theirs and the words and stories that feel the right fit for them. I love to seem them connect with their ‘sauce,’ their deep-down delicious juiciness.
That’s my story. What’s yours? And, if you’re not sure, are you ready to find out?
If the story you’re telling yourself just doesn’t work for you anymore, are you ready to make a new one that feels like a better fit?
Who does the Word Sauce e-course?
Writers, artists, musicians, photographers, educators, therapists, coaches, people in general but especially people who love to, want to or yearn to write – or write more.
