Restorative Writing

and the power of naming

from Oluf Olufsen Bagge - Yggdrasil, The Mundane Tree, translation of the Prose Edda, 1847

Dear writing friends,

In the North East of England, in the place where I grew up and to which I returned after many years of travel, there is an ancient Norse story about the power of words and writing.

The story goes that the god Odin was gifted with the knowledge of the runes after hanging upside down, with no food or drink, for nine days and nine nights from the branches of Yggdrasil, the World Tree. On the ninth day, Odin saw the runes revealed to him in the roots of the Tree and heard its branches sing the nine songs that are the basis of all rune magic.

Runes are mysterious symbols with magical significance. They are often carved on bones or stones or pieces of wood and can be used in divination and in the casting of spells and incantations.

Many years ago, the people of the North believed that each rune opened up its own direct channel to the gods’ powers. Runes provided healing from illness, pain and love gone wrong. They gave the powers of speech to those who had lost their voices. They assisted in childbirth as well as in war. They carried within them wisdom and essential knowledge.

This is just one origin story from one part of the world. Finding symbols and forms to hold the feelings swirling inside us, singing our stories so that others might hear them, inscribing, carving, inking our stories on the world, are ways that we humans have attempted to make meaning out of our lives since the beginning of time itself. These practices, like the World Tree, have roots that reach deep inside us.

We find a name for a feeling or an idea and speak it into being. We shape it, smooth it, hold it on our tongue or on a charm around our neck or between the pages of a book and it becomes a little more solid, a little easier to understand.

I have been fascinated by these connections between writing, health and creativity since I was a small girl, making tiny books out of folded paper in a corner of my bedroom. Writing is the place that I return to, over and over, to find calm, release, new understandings. Inside the shapes of letters and words, I can acknowledge the feelings that sometimes seem too big to hold inside my own skin. Writing helps me to sense my way into my body, to investigate my feelings, understand them, perhaps even remake them.

All of this is what I call restorative writing. It’s the new title of this community and newsletter, as I try to name for myself the approach to writing that I’ve been honing for more than twenty-five years now.

What do I mean by restorative writing?

I think of this, my approach to writing, as restorative in three ways.

1.
Writing can restore us to ourselves. It can restore the parts of us that we have forgotten, abandoned, neglected, disowned. It can help us to rest the weary parts, the parts that are too tired to continue in the ways that are no longer working for us. It is what comes through our bodies and onto the page, if we can only allow it to emerge. This is writing that we sing over the scattered bones, writing that helps us to let go of old, calcified forms, to shape-shift, to remake ourselves.

2.
We don’t have to do this alone. Restorative writing can restore us to one another. When we write together, in kind, compassionate community, we restore our faith in the power of words and stories. We create spaces together where we can write privately and share our reflections and experiences, where we can open up our most tender parts but also feel perfectly OK in those times when we prefer to hold our pages close to our chests. Many of us have learned along the way that writing spaces are tricky and competitive, places where words and selves get pulled apart. Restorative writing is about making safe spaces together, where we can welcome all the hesitant and hurt and frightened parts of ourselves, as well as the joyous and courageous and celebratory.

3.
Restorative writing can restore us to the world. We can explore the way that our spaces and identities shape us. We can rediscover what it is to write from a sense of ourselves at this place and time on the planet, and how we are held by the more-than-human world. We can learn to trust again, to feel again, and how it might feel to be part of something bigger than just one human body again.

If you are worn out, if you are grieving, if you are heartbroken, if you are uncertain or afraid, if you are stuck or cynical or numb, please join us. If you are feeling adventurous and afraid, yearning and overwhelmed, hopeful and confused, welcome.

Our first ever Restorative Writing Season begins 6 May 2024. This is an eight-week season of video ‘lessons’ designed to lead you through a restorative writing process, punctuated by our Writing Together sessions on Zoom. No need to share your writing ‘out loud’. Share reflections on your writing and your hopes or frustrations or discoveries about your writing and your creative process with supportive others.

Writing together, putting one word after another, we can connect our stories and remake our corners of the world.

Subscribe now and start digging deeper into my archived posts and writing ‘experiments.’ These experiments are my version of prompts, designed to help you bring kindness, curiosity, compassion and courage to your creative process. Come along to our 10 April Writing Together session on Zoom and find out how it all works.

Next Writing Together live workshop session:
Wednesday 10 April!

WRITING TOGETHER - DOING THE ACTUAL WRITING WITH KINDNESS AND SELF-COMPASSION
6.30pm - 8pm (UK time)
Productivity tools and systems can so often make us feel less than, not enough, or just plain rubbish. Let’s be kind to ourselves and one another. In this workshop, we’ll apply some very simple ideas and techniques for ACTUALLY DOING writing and we’ll spend a full hour working on our individual writing together, with some optional space for reflection at the end. Bring along a project that you’ve been feeling stuck with or something that you’d like to make a start on or tend to with kindness.

When you join us for a Writing Together paid subscriber session, you’ll find a gentle and restorative writing space where you’ll receive support and inspiration for your writing and reflection. Camera on or off, we’ll write together in response to writing rituals, suggestions and prompts and then have an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve written and the process. The first part of the workshop is recorded for everyone so that you can catch up later if you can’t join us in ‘real time’. The second reflective part of the workshop is never recorded, in order to honour confidentiality.

Thank you for making space for my words in your life. I appreciate you being here so much and I hope you'll join me on the next steps of this Restorative Writing journey.

With love,

Sophie x