The Art of Facilitating Workshops

Your love of writing can inspire others to find greater meaning, creativity, and joy! Your connection to your community and/or to learning communities around you can also lead to rich opportunities to help others write and find community in the process. It can also help you enhance your livelihood.

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 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, and Joy and Caryn's workshop gives writers some vital pointers and considerations for facilitating their own workshop (you can find out more about Joy and Caryn's approach and their annual Art of Facilitation class here).

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.