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Narrative therapy as creative practice

A three hour online workshop with Poh Lin Lee

1.30-4.30 (UK time) Monday November 18 th 2024

Cost £50

Click here for an application form

Narrative practice means so many things to many people depending on their context. It’s not one methodology, but a community of different ideas, practices and traditions that share ground in an ongoing fluid collaboration. Creativity is somewhat similar. It can take many forms and expressions. The kind of creativity that I want to be in a relationship with is one that maintains a relationship with a reflexive, ethical, anti- oppressive backbone.

Narrative therapy as a creative practice is a relational willingness to stretch beyond what is already known. It is a willingness to venture in or honour being untethered in liminality. It’s a willingness to dismantle what we already know, to unlearn and to be a part of emerging possibilities. Narrative therapy as a creative practice invites us to consider bodies of knowledge that are sidelined or left out as precious contributors and collaborators. 

If we see our narrative practice as a creative practice what do we get curious to grow, question, consider and adjust? If our time with people can be considered as ‘creative projects between collaborators’ how do we position within and engage with lived experience? 

In this experiential 3hr workshop we will together co-research stories of creative practice, how you might be defining or describing this, what might be restricting access and exchange between these fields of practice, what you might already be doing (quietly on the side). We will discuss the ways that positioning the practice as creative projects invites particular forms of agency (around time, space, co-design and documenting) and further contributes to reclaiming relational spaces shaped by preference, imagination and political action.

This workshop is for practitioners engaged in therapeutic, creative and community fields to circle back to explore their relationship to narrative practice and creativity to hone responses to complexity that include, nourish and sustain people and practitioners in these collective endeavours.

About Poh Lin Lee

narrativeimaginings.com

Currently based in Quebec City, I have created a unique consultation blend from my multiple locations and experience – narrative therapy practitioner, social worker, co-researcher of trauma/displacement, writer, teacher, film protagonist and film/creative consultant. Before this my practice was mainly co-researching with people and communities responding to themes of experience within family and state violence, displacement (from rights, land, home, body, identity, relationships), liminality and reclaiming practices of staying with experience and preference. My practice intersected with film when I  collaborated on the award winning film Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018) with director, Gabrielle Brady. I’m on the teaching faculty of Dulwich Centre; the teaching faculty & Board of Re-authoring Teaching; a honorary clinical fellow of the School of Social Work, University of Melbourne, the International Advisory Committee of the Latin American Journal of Clinical Social Work, the Editorial Board International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work and a lecturer for VCA Film and Television.