Dawn Garisch: EcARTe Conference 2015 and Writing as a Therapeutic Tool

The Santa Maria dello Spasimo in Palermo, a 500 year old unfinished Church, now an open air theatre and music venue.

By Dawn Garisch

I’ve always had a thing about islands. I lived on one as a child, I was Prospero in a school play and islands have sometimes featured in my novels, literally and metaphorically. So when a friend from the UK invited me to co-facilitate a drama therapy workshop at the conference of European Consortium for Art Therapies Education in Palermo last September, I couldn’t refuse despite the cost. His workshop involved visiting the themes of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and the premise was to explore what those clients with very limited inner or outer resources, might produce if they are provided with only brown paper to make puppets.
The theme for the conference for 2015 was ‘Cultural Landscapes’ ‒ how art therapists might work with more empathy, creativity and insight in cultural milieus other than their own. This is relevant to the current situation where millions of traumatised refugees are seeking help. The location was appropriate – Sicily has always been an island of diversity, attracting traders, immigrants, refugees and conquerors.
+++The venue was near the old part of town, in warehouses beautifully converted into art and dance studios. The 3-day programme included papers, posters and workshops presented by art, drama, music and dance therapists. As my field includes writing as a therapeutic tool, I was surprised to find that this modality was absent from the agenda.
+++I had planned to bunk much of the conference in order to wander round Palermo, but the conference itself was so interesting that I attended more than half, learning, for example, how delicate and chaotic movements in Butoh dance can enhance dance movement therapy, how a sense of ‘place’ can be developed through working within ‘space’, and how non-verbal cues in clients with autism, cerebral palsy and psychosis can be used by a therapist to communicate.
+++On the Friday morning the organisers announced that a presenter was unable to give her paper later that day and I offered to fill the gap. I have given talks and lectures previously in front of my fellow medics, at charity events and book clubs, but these were art therapy academics, and I had not prepared anything. Nevertheless, I felt proudly South African – the only representative from our country at the conference – and I was also pleased to present what I do and what the SA medical humanities initiative is doing to help people recover themselves through writing.
+++No researcher in SA has studied the outcomes of creative writing courses yet to my knowledge. What I have observed from my own process and while running memoir writing courses is that paying attention to our lives and creativity through the written word gives form in the world to those images that drive our behaviour. Whether we are writing fiction or memoir, we get to know ourselves better – our motivations, preoccupations, prejudices. The story that is taking shape under the pen starts to ‘talk back’ to the writer, and unexpected and interesting moments arrive on the page. We learn to follow a thread that is only partially determined by our ego concerns. Something takes over and shows us the way. This kind of reflective ‘dialogue’ between the art work and the artist promotes an attitude of curiosity and value, not only for the written story, but for our lives. This is a powerful tool for decreasing anxiety – the driver of many physical and social problems.
+++The obstacles that usually confront writers, particularly beginner writers, can be daunting. Learning the tools to negotiate with the inner critic around the creative act can help us be less critical of ourselves more generally. Reading one’s work to a group is immensely helpful. It takes courage to stand up in front of others, and say: this is who I am, this is where I’ve come from, this is what I made. This is particularly true for people who have been systematically abused or undervalued, and who have internalised a feeling of inferiority.
+++Listening to another person’s story can cut across assumptions. We discover that no matter what our class, colour, gender, we are all struggling with similar issues. Listening to others give considered, honest, respectful feedback on a piece of writing helps us to develop an inner editor that is no longer an undermining critic, but can assess more clearly what we have produced, and encourage us to improve on what we have achieved.
+++Taking the things that disturb us and exploring them in a creative way can teach us the tools to live more creatively and relatedly, less anxiously and destructively.
+++At registration we had been asked to contribute something creative at the closing ceremony. That final evening I was surprised by how few art therapists had volunteered to play music, sing, perform, dance or read. I had put my name down, but wanted to pull out when it became apparent how few of the 300 delegates around me were prepared to share a piece of themselves. But a large part of me objected to the part of me that was scared. After all, this is what we were there for, to explore how artistic practice might help us manage our lives.
+++So I read this poem, written originally for Mantis, the SA Jungian journal:

A Poem Runs Through

In the beginning, take note
of any disturbance. A mote drifts
in the peripheral eye, high as cumulus.

Wild birds are easier to capture.

Pied piper, seductive messiah, it calls:
with high notes and low flutes, across nations
and aeons, and thousands of poets reach
for their quills, their laptops, their pencils.

In school halls and bedrooms, in prisons and kitchens,
in protest or prayer, during break ups, or lunch breaks,
in attics and basements, while waiting for doctors,
during intervals at concerts; on waking with darkness
seeping through windows; on a lift that shudders
on the way down to the next long shift down a mine shaft;
on benches at beaches, when a child starts walking,
or a lost father passes; after leaving a lover or worn-out
marriage, words run like water onto airplane napkins,
or jot themselves down in magazine margins in the monitored
light of emergency rooms, or when drink spills dim rhythms
on backs of cigarette packs; when journalists or daughters go
mad, or go missing; after falling, after falling in love, after making
love, making sexually transmitted life or death and all things
that go with death,
+++instead of filling up with drugs, or food,
instead of switching on Hollywood, switching off, instead
of breaking, or breaking windows, instead of knotting
the noose, or hanging washing, artists reach for what’s beyond
them, take up their pens in an ecstasy of distress;
+++like rats, or small children,
they take leave of their everyday lives to follow
the poem, pulled by a strange loose music, they begin
slow migrations, turning in radiant spirals, learning to glide
on the wing of the slipstream of language and dream, finding
ways they might speak in a rhythm of ink, in a shifting arrangement
of sounds and significance, tending the art of cradling lightly,
impossibly gently, so as to limit harm done to the hurt, wild bird
that has come to their hand in a fallen fragment
+++of poem.

Dawn Garisch
May 2015