The Elixir of Creativity: Memoirs and Healing the Self with Catherine Ann Jones

In her workshops Catherine employs "focused journaling" " short writing exercises designed to facilitate self-healing as well as creating a deeper dialogue within. And these prompts certainly seem to evoke the best writing from the depths of participants' beings. When the attendees shared their work with the group it was invariably deeply touching and utterly riveting.

Based in Ojai, California, Catherine has led The Way of Story and Heal Your Self with Writing workshops throughout the United States, Europe, Middle East, and Asia.

Meryl Ann Butler: Thanks for visiting with OpEdNews today, Catherine. Our writers and readers have an enthusiastic interest in story, here! Editor-in-Chief, Rob Kall, used to run a successful annual event entitled, Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story.

I loved all three of the Crafting Memoir workshops I've attended with you and am happy to introduce you to our readers!

Can you share a bit about these workshops?

Catherine Ann Jones: Yes, teaching these workshops for over three decades now, I have seen hundreds of students perfect their craft by using highly personal, traumatic events as a catalyst for creative expression. Yet during the process of perfecting their writing craft, something else occurred.

Many of these participants shared with me how the workshop experience unexpectedly helped them to break free of the trauma itself " even after many years.

Witnessing these dramatic personal triumphs first hand inspired me to teach workshops to both writers and non-writers as a catalyst in order that the primal creative process could heal as well as instruct. Not just to understand the psychology of the trauma and suffering, but to transform the pain and the memory of the pain itself.

My main goal of both the workshop and the book, Heal Your Self with Writing as I state in the book's preface is : "Our lives may be determined less by past events than by the way we remember them. If we learn how to reframe the pieces of our past and re-vision our life story so that suffering becomes meaningful, we can radically boost our chances of self-healing, empowerment, growth, and transformation."

Again, I was enriched and humbled to see the participants in these workshops transform their personal demons and deepen their own life journey toward balance and wholeness.

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