I am a social artist committed to creating better stories -

about myself, women’s Herstory and the feminine in our world today.

To create a better story, the most important voice to hear is our own.

When we hear our own voice, we can step fully into what calls us;

we can step into what is ours to be and ours to do.

Then we can’t help but speak up and speak out.

One of the tools I use is autoethnography.

What is autoethnography?  

It is method and a process. It involves researching and telling story. It connects the personal to the cultural, social and political. Autoethnography is a powerful tool of transformation - a creative and analytical space to explore, celebrate and reveal the moments we live with ourselves and with each other. We tell our stories with the hope of inspiring others to speak their stories. Autoethnography uses dialogue, concrete action, scene setting, emotion, self-consciousness, character and plot lines. Texts are a variety of forms - short stories, poetry, photographic essays, scripts, layered writing, journals, social science prose, video documentaries. Usually in first-person voice, forms can be written, drawn, spoken and performed. Stories are living things - in the telling we shift, we grow, and we create new meanings that can be shared.

What can it do?

Autoethnography helps people to communicate differently and offers them alternative ways to live. In fact, we make the world by the stories we tell. They contain the power to reconnect us to our essence and help us discern that this essence is distinct from the belief systems that drive our actions. Story wakes us up.

How is it therapeutic?

Story can be the great concealer and the great revealer.  Narrative inquiry un-conceals our ways of being - the dynamic interplay between language, emotions, and body.  We become interested in understanding the events in our lives, curious about aspects of our lives that have been forsaken, fascinated with neglected territories of our identities and awed by our responses to the predicaments of our existence.

What do I do?

I help people shift into narrative. We are always manifesting a life we imagine.  It follows that our self-identity is generated from the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves, and the stories we tell to each other. I am both delighted and fascinated by what I routinely experience in journeys undertaken in therapeutic conversation.

We are born into narratives - the bigger stories that we inherit; they hold the frameworks of meaning through which we are socially constructed. Stories and narratives are present in every therapeutic conversation. Each of us can choose to transcend the limitations of our stories and therapeutic inquiry can be the catalyst to generate new realities. As your therapist, I hold the space that allows you to become aware of the fact that you are the author of your own existence and you have the power to create the stories you want to be living in.