Our 2023 Monthly Schedule 

The Collab Salon is a monthly webinar when online presenters and members from around the world meet informally in real time for 1.5 hours. We always meet at 4pm on the third Sunday of the month (New York time). In each of these Zoom “meetings on a cloud,” we focus on a different theme relating to narrative practice for further reflection/inquiry, cross-cultural exploration and learning.  After the meeting is over, the recording is added to our Library of Past Salons – available 24/7 to all Collab Salon members. All levels are welcome. You just need to register, download Zoom ahead of time, check your local time zone, and then come to our meeting room at the designated time.

I have had the pleasure and privilege of spending time in the company of our Collab Salon community. I join when I can in person. While in Gunnison, Colorado this winter, watching Collab Salon videos next to the fire has been awesome!

Ingrid B. Guerrieri , Marriage and Family Therapist, San Diego, California. Gunnison, Colorado and Bogota, Colombia

I can’t recommend the Collab Salon enough. This year’s lineup showcases some of the most fascinating and innovative up and coming practitioners and their practice. And you can both meet and hear about this in the most intimate of situations, almost as if your were sitting around a dinner table speaking to one another as old friends. We should all be thankful to Re-Authoring Teaching for creating such a ‘space’ for practitioners and their practices to meet one another from all around the world.

I am happy to be able to share with colleagues from around the world the methods and practices we have developed in France for working with companies and organizations!

Pierre Blanc-Sahnoun, Co-Founder La Fabrique Narrative
 I cannot say enough how much I have learned from and enjoy these Salons. Thank you for putting the energy and effort into such a rich experience for so many of us out ‘in the trenches’.  I would like to hear more from these presenters and I hope they will return or be invited to put on an online course or somewhere on the Re-authoring Teaching website.
Marija Welton LMFT, Tonasket, Washington, USA

18 Alliant Continuing Education Credits Approved!

Do you want to earn Continuing Education Credit?   18 CE credits have now been approved by Alliant International University for attending and/or viewing our entire 2023 series and filling out a brief evaluation after each Collab. CEs cost an additional $40.

18 Alliant CE Now Approved for the 2023 Series!

Looking for a Particular Presenter, Hot Topic or Theme?

Look below to see what’s in store for 2023. This year, we selected presenters with topics particularly relevant to our 11 Hot Topics and 1 burning topic for the New Decade.

Please try out our Search! We’ve added all six years of Post Salons as well as the coming year, Type in whom or what you are looking for, and see what you find.

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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? In this Collab Salon, Poh will share experiential exercises and stories of practice to discuss the possibilities that flow from a multi-storied invitation to our bodies to participate – with specific attention to consent and practices ‘with’ rather than ‘on’. These practices have been co-produced in conversations across diverse contexts and in response to experiences of displacement, injustice and exclusion.
 

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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.

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This Collab Salon 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.

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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. Further details coming.

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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.”In this Salon they will share stories and ideas that group members generated for further circulation and co-sparking.

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How can we teach Narrative therapy in a way which responds to its philosophy and ethics? How can Narrative therapy change and develop in our collaborations and engaging with new ideas? How can we work together in the team paying attention to power relationships? How can we be narrative practitioners in actual political situation in Russia and in the world? When we started our project, KRAI, together with our colleagues, we were drawn to this questions and a lot more. We’ve developed a diverse yearlong program on Narrative therapy and community work as long as another laboratories and workshops. We are glad to share our experience at the Collab salon.

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In this Collab on using re-membering practices in writing, we will explore these ideas on team development  to use to connect you to the people that support you to be the therapist/ teacher/ person you want to be and to help clients with their teams.  We will work 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.

This collab will demonstrate and discuss a genre of inquiry that David Epston has come to refer to as ‘Hauntings from the future’ (by benevolent ghosts) in intractable disputes between parent(s) and their adolescent children.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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In the final Collab for the year, Ian invites 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.

PLEASE NOTE:  Our collective membership dues helps with the ongoing maintenance and development of this website. If you can, please become a Collab Salon member.   Our monthly Collab is open to both members and visitors.  Members can access the recording and earn CEs as well. One way or another: Please Join us! 

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