‘Your Life, Your Story’ a workshop held in National Care Leavers Week 2017.
This was a trauma informed writing workshop for care experienced adults with Lisa Cherry and Rosie Canning organised by Amanda Knowles, Trustee and Director of The Consortium for Therapeutic Communities and Richard Rollinson, The Barns Centre Executive Director, in Toddington.
As I drove up to The Barns centre, a building steeped in Therapeutic Community history and practice, a sense of calm fell upon me in that way that safety would feel were it a veil. Joining us would be 14 care-experienced adults ranging in age from 18-59. They were described as: “…extraordinary, and courageous people”. They were this and much more. Inspiring and inspirational. Warm and funny. Resilient. Beautiful human beings giving to the world and living truly exceptional lives.
Writing is creativity and creativity is the epitome of vulnerability and we were all willing participants, comforted in knowing that there was so much that we simply need not say for having the experience that we shared; ‘care’.
Writing our personal stories is the most vulnerable kind of writing we can do. We fear being laughed at, rejected, or that our words will be met with silence. And in turn, we ourselves remain silent. And yet there is a history of writing of poetry for those of us with a history that entailed being looked after by others than our family. Personal, therapeutic, historical evaluation underpin this relationship between the expression of abandonment and loss and writing as a tool for making sense of the nonsensical.
“When I started my PhD, looking at the representation of care leavers in fiction, there was very little published about care leavers, but over the last few years there has been an explosion of new stories, new voices, often finally being heard after years of being invisible.” Rosie Canning
Some of the books used or referenced in no particular order, included:
Novels:
My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal
Island by Jane Rogers
The Panoptican by Jenni Fagan
All the Good Things by Clare Fisher
When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman
The Seven Sister by Alex Wheatle
Lost for Words by Stephanie Butland
Memoir:
Plot 29 by Allan Jenkins
Autobiography:
The Looked After Kid by Paolo Hewitt
Fifty-One Moves by Ben Ashcroft
Non-fiction or Informational Text:
The Brightness of Stars by Lisa Cherry
Books about writing:
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson
Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott
A Novel in a Year by Doughty, Louise
We tell bits of our story in order to have relationships. It would be difficult to have relationships and friendships without having some version of a life story floating around. The act of telling our story acts as a framing method or even a re-framing of previous life experience. It gives us an opportunity to shape our own narrative and begin to let go of the narrative of others that we may not even recognise. It gives a semblance of making sense of the chaos left behind. Stories are life, life is stories. A life story is written in pencil, not ink and can be rubbed out and changed. You’re both the narrator and the main character of your story.
It’s also important to realize that you’re not just living out your story, you’re actually in charge of it. Even if it is a terrible story, which is hard to share; the act of sharing, writing and rewriting gives a new realisation and possible resolution. That awful sense of being unable to change what went before can suddenly be lifted. For example, a simple act of changing a point of view, can suddenly release a narrator and give them a distance and freedom to write their story.
We can take control of our narratives – our stories, by how they are told, what’s included, what’s left out. We can change the ‘single story’, the single narrative. And the truly exciting thing about this is that you can put out a new version of yourself and live your way into it.
Some of the best moments:
Watching a young man who didn’t want to hold a pen, let alone write his story transform into a confident person who stood up and read out his writing.
Watching people change their ‘I’ into ‘he’ or ‘she’, third person narratives and finding their voices and freedom from their pasts.
Hearing a woman and mother, give herself the words that meant she finally found the words to write about her inability to honour her mother’s tragic death.
Seeing a man who could only doodle his thoughts and feelings suddenly break through and not only put together sentences, but paragraphs, chapters and now is half way through a novel.
#NCLW2017 Your Life Your Story.