What AWA Facilitators do
Here is a snapshot of the reach and power of the AWA Method:
- Vicki Pinkerton leads writing workshops with the Nuntut Gwit’chen people north of the Arctic Circle.
- Jill Goodacre writes with First Nation adults and intergenerational survivors who suffer from the legacy of Indian Residential School trauma in British Columbia.
- Mary Tuchscherer travels to Limbe, Malawi, and writes with teachers and AIDS orphans
- Aaron Zimmerman offers writing workshops with the incarcerated men at Rikers Island, and in methadone clinics, homeless shelters and afterschool programs in Brooklyn, New York
- Mary Kim Kaylor leads a writing workshop in a high security hospital with patients and guards in Lake Oswego, Oregon
- Kate Murphy writes with the blind at the Royal National Institute of Blind People in Northern Ireland
- Katie McCleary offers workshops with hundreds of teens in Sacramento, California
and of course, I’ve been writing for 13 years with women (and occasionally men) incarcerated in the Lindsay Correctional Centre in Ontario. And here in Toronto the Toronto Writers’ Collective are doing terrific work offering free workshops for the last three years to a wide range of marginalized and silenced populations.
This list is both small and huge: small in representing only a fraction of the people that AWA reaches; huge in that it represents the power of what we do.
We who write together know that as our words arrive on the page, we are deeply connected to who we are and to each other. We also know listening to others and being listened to in return is profound. We gave each other this gift, and AWA made it possible.
If you can’t join us but would still like to support the work we do, you can donate here:
This button will open a portal with a donation of 1.00 and a quantity of 1. Change the quantity to the number of dollars you would like to donate, hit “Tab” or “Enter” so the dollar figure adjusts to the new quantity, and then click the yellow and blue Paypal button to go to the Paypal Portal and complete your payment.
Thank you so much!
In the summer of 2013 I was invited to do a TEDtalk on “Shining the light on our Changing Communities”. I talked about the therapeutic writing program I do with incarcerated women. You can view the talk here.
