CCU professor holds workshop on healing powers of story
In this lecture and workshop, Richardson asks participants to probe the charged spaces in their own lives and explore their connections through imaginative writing exercises. She will reference poetry, neuroscience, her own writing and many more topics to delve into the therapeutic power of storytelling.
"It's us, it's us there on the page, even when we are writing imaginary stories," says Richardson. "The people of my life show up when I write, and I show up too, not in our own forms but embedded in fictional images. We can't help but to face ourselves and our culture through the symbols that fascinate us."
Richardson earned an MFA from the University of Alabama, and her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Collagist, the Indiana Review, Joyland, the Masters Review and Word Riot. Her most recent collection of short stories, "It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides" (2015), won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and was long listed for the PEN American Center Award. Richardson is currently working on a novel about emotional contagion and weather.
The event is sponsored by the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts in conjunction with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. A coffee social precedes the lecture at 9:30 a.m.
The lecture is the second of three in the Arts and Healing series; the third focuses on music therapy and will take place at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 16, also at the Myrtle Beach Education Center Theater.
"The genesis behind this series stemmed from thoughts of nontraditional means of healing, how the arts might play a therapeutic role, and perhaps how the fine arts can help heal us both emotionally and physically,"Â said Amy Tully, associate dean of the Edwards College.
The Myrtle Beach Education Center is located at 900 79th Ave. N. at the corner of U.S. 17 Bypass and 79th Avenue North.
For more information, contact Tully at atully@coastal.edu or 843-349-2352.