The Art of Facilitating Workshops

Your love of writing can inspire others to find greater meaning, connection, and joy! It can also help you enhance your livelihood. The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow (WCDH) is pleased to present an interactive virtual writing workshop instructed by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Joy Roulier Sawyer. Facilitation—like writing—is a lifelong art. “The Art of Facilitating Workshops” will give writers the basic tools to develop their own writing workshops.

Facilitating writing workshops in your community, school, or college can bring immense satisfaction and a means to earn income. Discover some of the best practice for facilitating community-building sessions—ones in which people feel free to take healthy creative risks, listen more deeply to both each other and their own writing, and craft powerful prose or poetry. In addition to focusing on best facilitation practices, we’ll also discuss how to find potential venues and groups for offering your own workshop, as well as the relationship between teaching and facilitation. And we’ll do some creative writing ourselves!

The workshop will be Saturday, April 30th, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm CST on Zoom. Participants will be given the link upon registration. The class fee is $35 per person and all proceeds benefit the WCDH scholarship fund. Register at www.writerscolony.org/events, emailing director@writerscolony.org, or by calling 479-253-7444.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, founder of Transformative Language Arts, has been leading community creative, healing, and social change arts workshops for years, and she has trained and supervised many graduate students in facilitation. She studied meeting facilitation and organizational development through Quaker, bioregional, and grassroots traditions and teachers. Over the last 30 years, she's facilitated hundreds of meetings for groups and businesses and trained dozens of community groups and entrepreneurs. She is the past Kansas Poet Laureate and author of 24 books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. Read more here.

Joy Roulier Sawyer has been facilitating counseling groups, community gatherings, spiritual congregations, and writing workshops since 1995. A retired licensed professional counselor and poetry/journal therapist and supervisor, she now uses her therapeutic expertise to facilitate writing outreaches to those experiencing homelessness, mental health challenges, addiction, and women transitioning out of incarceration. A widely published author and poet, she recently revised and updated the third edition of Biblio/Poetry Therapy: The Interactive Process, a seminal textbook for writing and healing practitioners. Learn more here.

The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow is a 501(c)3 nonprofit whose mission is to nurture writers of all genres, backgrounds, and levels of experience in a supportive environment that builds community, energizes creative expression, stimulates new thinking, and optimizes productivity. Since opening its doors to writers in 2000, the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow has made a lasting impact on the arts and literary communities hosting over 1,700 writers from 48 states and 13 countries. For more information, please call Michelle Hannon or Jeanne Glass at (479)253-7444.