Writers Victoria

This workshop is an introduction to the practice of writing therapy to help process difficult emotions like grief and trauma.

Through free writing exercises, participants explore challenging life events in an emotionally safe and supportive way. The session has a strong focus on writing craft and skill acquisition to help soften the emotional sting of difficult subject matter, freeing participants to make art from suffering, to turn poison into power. 

Whether writing for an audience, or purely for personal purposes, participants learn simple and tested techniques to bring writing to life and to give personal stories universal resonance.

By the end of the session, participants embark on their long-form personal writing project with confidence and the tools to do so in a way that empowers them to reframe life events to promote healing, acceptance and meaning.  

Course requirements: pen and paper or a fully charged device to participate in the writing exercises.

You Will Learn:

• How to get unstuck and achieve a flow state with your writing practice
• How to evoke all the senses so that writing conjures a multi-dimensional world
• How to move from feeling like a puppet having strings pulled by life, to become the puppet master and author of your own story
• How to identify the elements of the personal journey that will make for compelling narrative non-fiction
• The fundamentals of free writing as a tool to process life’s challenges

About the Tutor:

Tim Baker is an award-winning journalist and a best-selling author. His latest book Patting The Shark documents his journey managing a stage 4 cancer diagnosis. Tim wrote Patting The Shark as part of a creative writing PhD scholarship from Griffith University. He is a former editor of Tracks, Surfing Life and Slow Living magazines, and a two-time winner of the Surfing Australia Hall of Fame Culture Award. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review, the Sunday Age, the Bulletin, Inside Sport, GQ, and Text Journal. 

Note: Memoir as Catharsis is based upon Tim’s own academic research into writing therapy as part of a creative writing PhD, his lived experience as a cancer survivor who has used personal memoir as a potent source of catharsis and his lived experience as an author and journalist over 40 years. 

This workshop is not intended to replace personal psychotherapy or counselling, but can be a helpful adjuvant practice to support the therapeutic process.