Programs
Writing & Wellness
A Recurring Retreat with the Boston Public Health Commission
This program provides expressive writing as a practice for self-care, meditation, team-building, and resilience with community health care workers, racial equity trainers, and administrators. Through collaborative and individual, guided exercises, participants explore therapeutic methods aimed at honoring their own well-being while inundated within the trauma and and urgency demanded by their profession.
Radical Reversal
A Multi-Disciplinary Workshop at the Suffolk County House of Correction
We’re collaborating with acclaimed poet and musician, Randall Horton, to bring music, poetry, and performance to correctional facilities, demonstrating how art can play a pivotal role in social justice and provide pathways for artists to give back. Writers Without Margins has been selected to participate in this Creative Capital national program, which is also currently being offered in Alabama and Minnesota.
Write Here, Write Now
A Peer-led Writing Group at the Safe & Sound Recovery Center
This peer-led, writing group is held within the Mass and Cass vicinity of treatment centers and public health services targeting unsheltered individuals. Our expressive writing model is tailored to nurture compassionate reflection and offer inroads to confronting addiction and adversity through writing.
Writing In Respite
Expressive Writing Workshop at the Barbara McInnis House
This workshop is provided to individuals receiving inpatient medical care and is offered to participants during their extended stays at the Barbara McInnis House, a Boston Healthcare for the Homeless respite care center. Literary examples, writing exercises, and collaborative discussion allow for thoughtful contemplation and creativity to engender self-growth and empowerment during a critical time of refuge and healing.
Step By Step
Expressive Writing Workshop at Step by Step Supportive Services
This workshop, located at an outpatient, treatment center, aims to engage adults with psychiatric, cognitive, and social disabilities through the healing power of expressive writing. Through art, guided exercises, guest speakers, and collaborative discussion, we explore the ways in which language, poetry, literature, storytelling, and other expressive modalities can promote healing, recovery, and authority.
Inside Expression
Expressive Writing Workshop at the Suffolk County House of Correction
In 2020, during the pandemic, we piloted our first, live workshop for sentenced individuals at the Suffolk County House of Correction. This workshop series is intended to be the first of several “behind the wall.”
This program was modeled after the workshop showcased in the documentary, In Their Shoes: Unheard Stories of Reentry & Recovery. The group, which took place twice a week, uses the techniques of literary discussion, guided prompts, and expressive writing. Utilizing the philosophy of “credible messengers,” which espouses the belief that communities have within them transformative resources to lift up justice-involved people in a comprehensive and positive way, this workshop will always be facilitated by a returning citizen who exemplifies the possibility of sustainable change from within.
The Intensive Caregivers
Available Upon Request
For more information or to see if you or your organization is eligible to host a workshop (either live or virtual), please send us a message, and someone from our team will respond at their earliest convenience. This workshop is designed for those who self-identify as “caregivers,” whether by traditional or less conventional definitions, or both. Almost universally, we experienced how the Covid-19 pandemic increased pressure for people to take care of one another, from homeschooling to grief counseling, in unprecedented ways, while “essential workers” bore the burden of the economy and health care system, often with little, affordable, mental health support. These workshops encourage expressive writing as an accessible, artistic and therapeutic outlet for an individual’s own self-care, clarity, and connection. Our first workshop was held with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Sexual Assault Response Unit’s Disabled Person’s Protection Commission and we have continued with the Boston Public Health Commission's "Writing & Wellness" series.
Boston Public Library
Workshops Open to the Public
We’ve teamed up with the Boston Public Library and its local branches to provide a variety of FREE, expressive writing groups matching the interests and energies of library patrons and the specializations and backgrounds of our facilitators who come from the surrounding neighborhoods and the communities we share. Since 2015, we’ve offered workshops facilitated by freestyle artists, therapists, and professors on everything from managing our emotions in times of isolation and upheaval, to nature, to history, to embodying and articulating the elements of poetic, performance art. These workshop series run periodically and are available at various library branches throughout the Greater Boston area.
For current classes and workshops listings visit Boston Public Library calendar here or Writers Without Margins, Inc on Facebook.