Collecting Crumbs of Wisdom: Narrative Practice and Parenting

Poh Lin Lee, MA is a Chinese Malaysian Australian woman who comes to practice from multiple locations - narrative therapy practitioner, social worker, co-researcher of trauma/displacement, writer, teacher, film protagonist, and film/creative consultant. She is committed to practices that involve critically reflecting on values, beliefs, and biases and actively working to eliminate systems that maintain unearned privileges and unjust oppressions. For many years, Poh has created innovative narrative therapy projects and practices regarding family and state violence, displacement (from rights, land, home, body, identity, relationships), liminality, and reclaiming practices of staying with experience and preference. She collaborated on the award-winning film Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018) with director Gabrielle Brady. Poh is on the teaching faculty of the Dulwich Centre, the teaching faculty & Board of Re-Authoring Teaching; an honorary clinical fellow of the School of Social Work and a lecturer for Film and Television, University of Melbourne; on the International Advisory Committee of the Latin American Journal of Clinical Social Work, the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work and a sessional facilitator for Dokomotive Collective Filmhaus Köln Attagirl DocX Archive Lab International Documentary Association, The Flaherty and The Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts.

Peggy Sax, PhD (Cornwall, Vermont), is the founder and Executive Director of Re-Authoring Teaching – this global learning community of narrative therapy practitioners, teachers, and enthusiasts. Having apprenticed herself to narrative therapy since the early 1990s, Peggy has worked for several decades in independent practice as a licensed psychologist/family therapist, consultant, teacher and international trainer. Previously, she worked in several innovative public sector programs including birth to three infant development, intensive home-based services, parent child centers, and community mental health. Peggy is the author of several articles and the book, Re-Authoring Teaching: Creating a Collaboratory. Whether online, on-the-road or within her beautiful home state of Vermont, it gives her great joy to bring together favorite people, ideas, and practices – to learn, engage, play, and replenish together.

Akansha Vaswani-Bye, PhD is a licensed counseling psychologist born and raised in Mumbai and currently lives in Seattle. She is a principal faculty member in the SPIRIT (Supporting Psychosis Innovation through Research, Implementation, & Training) Center in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. Her current research and training efforts are focused on developing and supporting the family peer community who care for loved ones living with the effects of problematic psychotic states. She is also an attending psychologist at an HIV primary care clinic located in a public hospital in Seattle. She is leading and co-leading research projects that are adapting a single-session narrative therapy approach aimed at improving access to mental health care among people living with HIV and at risk for HIV in integrated and community-based care settings. As a doctoral scholar, her research focused on the ethical and medical-legal issues that arise in psychiatry due to academic-industry relationships and solutions for reform. She was first introduced to narrative practices when she worked at Ummeed Child Development Center in Mumbai where she was fortunate to learn these ideas from Peggy Sax, Shona Russell, Maggie Carey, and Jehanzeb Baldiwala. She has been a Board Member of Re-Authoring Teaching since 2016.