Poetry in the Park: Finding Your Creative Voice in Difficult Times

Join us for this very special Poetry in the Park event entitled "Finding Your Creative Voice in Difficult Times," facilitated by the esteemed poetic medicine practitioner, John Fox, PPM. This experiential workshop will provide simple techniques and creative ways to bring the healing art of poetry to others.

During this poetry workshop, we will dig into finding your creative voice - a voice that says YES to life. A voice that helps you meet living during difficult times with heart, and welcomes you to speak up for what matters to you.

In these very challenging days, our voice, your voice, deserves to be given more room.

These lines from the poem A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Stafford catch the sense and spirit of what John envisions:

"And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes, or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep."

Materials: Writing implements, pen/pencil, paper, electronic device for writing.

John Fox is the author of Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making and Finding What You Didn’t Lose: Expressing Your Truth and Creativity Through Poem-Making. These are available on Amazon and other platforms. His work is featured in the PBS documentary, Healing Words: Poetry and Medicine. He contributed Healing the Within to The Healing Environment published by the Royal College of Physicians in the United Kingdom in 2003 – along with many other essays in a wide-range of books to the present.

John is President of The Institute for Poetic Medicine, a 501(c)3 nonprofit founded in 2005. IPM is dedicated to serving marginalize people by funding poetic medicine programs that serve men and women in Pr*son, people living with cancer and Parkinson’s Disease, immigrant and refugee youth, people living with mental health challenges, elders, survivors of domestic abuse, those overcoming substance use and the unhoused.

John lives in Mountain View, California. You can find out more about this work at www.poeticmedicine.org

PARKING: Park near the tennis courts and walk behind the tennis courts to the open field with the redwood trees and picnic benches.

If the parking lot by the tennis courts is full, you can drive to 847 Clinton Rd, Los Altos and park on that street. There is a back entrance with plenty of easy street parking there.

IN CASE OF RAIN: Please note that if it is raining, we will meet at our Mountain View - Los Altos office at: 4984 El Camino Real, Ste 208, Los Altos, CA

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