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Each month we focus on a different theme as a starter dough for invigorating conversation. Members can join us in real time and also review archived materials.

December 17, 2023 Collab Salon: On Inspiration

Thank you to all who have contributed to the Collab for 9 years. Please join us during these challenging times as we mark Collab Endings and New Beginnings together, and link our lives around inspiration.  This Collab has three parts:1- Re-membering the Collab Salon:Cohosts Peggy Sax, Charley Lang & Larry Zucker will  briefly share some of our initial inspirations, history, intentions, hopes, and significant changes over the years.2- On Inspiration: Ian Percy will invite us to reflect on the experience, the effects, and the practice of inspiration. He will guide us to focus on:  Recalling and honouring an experience of inspiration during the past year and Imagining possible experiences of inspiration during the year to come. 3- Inspiring and imagining The NextGen Collaboratory: Poh, Akansha and Peggy will glimpse the upcoming series of six bi-monthly 3-hour gatherings, beginning in May 2024, reaffirming our narrative foundations while exploring contemporary and emerging narrative practices.

2023-12-26T14:34:42-05:00October 13th, 2022|Comments Off on December 17, 2023 Collab Salon: On Inspiration

January 15, 2023 Collab Salon: Our Multi-storied bodies

What happens when we shift from viewing our bodies as a single entity to experiencing our bodies as a community of diverse members each with their own experience, position and stories? We will take a look at micro-practices and lines of enquiry that can disrupt the familiar and expected ways our bodies might be invited (or not) into therapeutic spaces and conversations.This can assist us in attending to experiences of being mandated to therapy (by people, institutions or ideas), responding to the effects of trauma/non-choice, and inviting us to move in unexpected ways in response and, at times, resistance to the ways in which we are being demanded.

2023-12-26T14:55:22-05:00October 12th, 2022|Comments Off on January 15, 2023 Collab Salon: Our Multi-storied bodies

November 19, 2023 Collab Salon: Letter writing campaigns: You never know what might emerge from a ‘roadblock’

 Are you meeting with people who are living with Despair? Or where problem stories or descriptions have taken over a person’s identity, and/or where systemic, structural and/or institutional forms of oppression have contributed to ‘totalized identity conclusions’? (Eg. I’m a Troublemaker, I’m Too Damaged To Be In A Relationship, There’s Something Wrong With Me’). What guides your approach to conversations with people facing Despair, or where a person’s identity has been overtaken by a problem story? Amy Druker will share an attempt at a letter writing campaign with a young person who was (at the time of the proposed letter writing campaign) surviving within the carceral system, and what emerged when we encountered a “roadblock”. Amy will share a recorded interview with a friend of the young person who was surviving time inside, who participated in the project of helping her friend reclaim his life from Despair and Hopelessness.

2023-11-21T13:25:58-05:00October 11th, 2022|0 Comments

May 21, 2023 Collab Salon: Stories of Resistance to Isolation

Rocio and Akansha extended the following invitation to participants in a Re-Authoring Teaching Consultation Group from January-April 2023.Are you feeling a sense of isolation and disenchantment in your work? Do you feel you are being recruited into stories of dominant ideas of what a “good therapist” is or stories that are pathologizing of the people who consult you? We invite you to resist these stories and ideas in this community consultation group and think together about what you would prefer your practice to embody. Rocio and Akansha will create space for conversations about preferred ethics, consultation with your insider knowledges and wisdom, and articulation of consonant practices and ways of being. They will draw on their lived experiences of working in sites of “modern power” and support you in inhabiting your narrative multilingual voice. In this Salon they will share stories and ideas that group members generated for further circulation and co-sparking.

2023-05-24T11:03:59-04:00October 11th, 2022|Comments Off on May 21, 2023 Collab Salon: Stories of Resistance to Isolation

April 16, 2023 Collab Salon: Remembering Michael 15 Years Later

In this Collab we remember Michel White who died in April 2008. We bring together a number of people lucky enough to know Michael personally to talk with each other about memories, Michael's legacy and what lies ahead.

2023-05-23T08:36:52-04:00October 7th, 2022|Comments Off on April 16, 2023 Collab Salon: Remembering Michael 15 Years Later

July 16, 2023 Collab Salon: Re-Membering Writing Practices

In this Collab on using re-membering practices in writing, we explored ideas to help connect you with your own team that supports you to be the person/therapist/teacher you most want to be. We worked with some writing prompts to put this into practice and see who we long to talk with and what you hope they might ask us about.

2023-07-17T14:55:34-04:00October 5th, 2022|1 Comment

September 17, 2023 Collab Salon: The Power of Resonance and Transport: Experiences of a Narrative Reflecting Team

The Vermont Center for Narrative Practice (VCNP) has been utilizing a Narrative Reflecting Team consultation model that incorporates the 4 part “Retelling” process outlined by Michael White (2005, p. 190)1 for Outsider Witnesses: 1) Expression 2) Image 3) Personal Resonance 4) Transport.  Through our conversation together at the Collab Salon, our aim is to share our experiences as a team particularly with the processes of Resonance and Transport and to learn how participants have also incorporated these elements into their own narrative practices (whether through reflecting teams or not). It is our hope that this dialogue will foster new understandings of these mechanisms and move us to consider different ways of incorporating these outsider witness practices into our work with others.

2023-09-20T05:23:04-04:00October 4th, 2022|Comments Off on September 17, 2023 Collab Salon: The Power of Resonance and Transport: Experiences of a Narrative Reflecting Team

October 15, 2023 Collab Salon: Stories Gone Missing: Questions I Wish I’d Been Asked

What are the lost stories as yet untold, for which we’ve never been asked?  During an interview or therapeutic conversation, have you ever thought… “I don’t know about that, but there’s a different question I want to answer?”  Have you ever thought to yourself…. “I’ve thought about such and such, and no one has asked me about this.  I think I would really like to develop that story and have a witness for that type of conversation…” We are hoping to open some space when people can talk about questions they wish they would be or would have been asked and why that question?  This is not really a workshop to learn how to ask better questions, though there are likely to be new or different questions to be gathered.  It’s a chance for us to get together and get off our chests a few of the questions that we would like to be asked.  It’s an opportunity for the telling of some of our stories, and to do so in our own manner. Please bring two questions you wish you could be or would have liked to have been asked.

2023-10-17T06:43:16-04:00September 11th, 2022|1 Comment

February 19, 2023 Collab Salon: Supporting Young People Who Are Worried about Climate Change

Today’s young people are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Significant disruptions are predicted as they navigate more frequent extreme weather events, in parallel with major lifestyle and community changes as we move to a zero-carbon economy. Research is identifying how deeply concerned many young people are about what they will face in their future in both the global north and south. How might we in the narrative community offer safe and compassionate spaces for children and young people to voice their concerns, be heard, and have their feelings validated and respected? There is a role for young people to be energized and active in addressing the climate emergency and it is important that we walk alongside them to be part of the solutions.

2023-02-22T06:23:05-05:00September 11th, 2022|Comments Off on February 19, 2023 Collab Salon: Supporting Young People Who Are Worried about Climate Change

March 19, 2023 Collab Salon: The Radical-ness of Love, Attunement, and Imagination

This Collab brings forward the research and approaches of SuEllen Hamkins, Lynne Rosen, and Navid Zamani as they consider the ethics and effects of love and imagination, and the helpful-ness of attunement. Presenters will outline some of their theoretical assumptions, its intersection with broader social justice ethics and values, and the life that these practices breathe in our relationships with those who consult us. Their conversation gives a sneak preview of the new series now in development: Narrative Therapy, Trauma & the Affective Turn.

2023-03-21T17:23:41-04:00September 10th, 2022|Comments Off on March 19, 2023 Collab Salon: The Radical-ness of Love, Attunement, and Imagination