Scottish International Symposium for Storytelling as a Healing Art

A week-long residential course for storytellers, teachers, health and care professionals, communities and friends. Including 5 days of workshops on the theme Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Exile

Sef Townsend and Tony Haddad's
workshops will focus on practical ideas for working with those who experience exile and the realities of dislocation. Feelings of loss and isolation, frustration and grief are regularly uppermost for the refugee. Healing often comes in being listened to. But that is not easy when you don’t even know the language, and anyway, telling one’s story has its dangers.
The workshops will look at ways in which storytelling and story sharing can be used to enable the voice of the refugee to be heard. An active interaction with traditional stories is often a safer way of saying the unspeakable, but the [refugee] teller often has the wonderful feeling of being heard. The careful choice of story, the use of language, working with speakers of other languages, cultural sensitivity, family involvement, celebrating difference, as well as what our own personal exile might be, will all be considered.