The Collab Salon: Endings and New Beginnings

December 17, 2023 was our last Collab Salon in its current form. For almost nine years, the monthly Collab Salon provided a space for people worldwide to come together and share their experiences and ideas about narrative therapy. With deepening understanding of intercultural considerations, differences, and accountability, we are thrilled to have featured about 100 presenters with presentations across narrative generations around the world. Together we created a unique platform that promoted co-learning, connection, and the evolution of narrative therapy.

The recording for the last Collab Salon has now been added to our Library of Past Salons, available to Re-Authoring Teaching members here – for your enjoyment and if you are earning CE credits for the 2023 series. You can also earn 18 CE credits for each of the 2020, 2021 and 2022 series.

We are proud of the community we have co-created. We are also ready for a change that celebrates new generations of narrative practitioners, co-learning from each other about foundational and emerging contemporary narrative practices.

Endings and new beginnings invite reflection. While we prepare for our upcoming NextGen Collaboratory series, please join us in reviewing what we have co-created and what we have learned along the way.

 How can we build Contemporary Narrative Therapy on What Matters Most to Us? 

 Collab 2.0 – otherwise known as The NextGen Collaboratory – will build on the learnings of the previous version of the Collab and take the idea of the collaboratory to a new level.  We begin our explorations of Contemporary Narrative Therapy by contemplating what matters most to us to carry forward from our intellectual ancestors, Michael White and David Epston. Co-facilitators Akansha Vaswani-Bye, Poh Lin Lee and Peggy Sax will bring together contributors from different perspectives to participate in a conversation guided by a spirit of inquiry to explore:

1. **What is your narrative backbone?
2. **How are you actively cross-pollinating with other fields of inquiry?
3. **How does narrative therapy shape your adventures with writing, teaching, supervision, research, and co-research practices?  
4. **Where do you focus your work, attending to specific contexts across the lifespan? 
5. **How do creative traditions and practices collaborate with narrative therapy in your context?
6. *How would you describe the places you co-create when you take narrative practices beyond the traditional therapy settings? 

Witnesses to each conversation will then gather in small facilitated groups to reflect and inquire according to specific guiding questions into what they have heard, places of resonance, and ripple effects on their own experiences. Coming back together as a large group, we anticipate discoveries and new possibilities and grappling with congruence. The goal is to create a space for exploration, play, and the sharing of ideas, while also maintaining ethics and accountability.

We can hardly wait to share what’s cooking behind the scenes.

Stay tuned for more details here and in our newsletter!