FREE ADMISSION – 1757 Ashland St., Ashland, OR. One mile west of I-5 Exit 14.
We tell our stories in order to live. We change our stories in order to heal.
Whatever the medium, the creative process can take you to places your usual habits of mind rarely go. Places containing riches- buried memories from childhood, ancestral and past life traumas, guidance from angels, elementals, and other divine messengers- which make up your unique soul signature. In this presentation, Victoria Costello, an Emmy Award-winning, six times-published author of memoir and fiction and a popular teacher for WritingWorkshops.com, demonstrates how anyone can access these untapped resources to excavate the bones of a new, healing story.
Victoria introduces her own groundbreaking, trauma-informed approach to the hybrid genre of life writing called autofiction, mixing memoir and fiction to tell a deeper truth with the intention of uncovering and mending a psychic wound. As she demonstrates in excerpts from her own writing and that of her students, it is in this tension between what actually happened to you and what might have happened that a new, healing story can be found. One offering a valuable lesson for your soul path.
To develop her approach, Victoria has drawn insights from narrative medicine and various family therapy modalities. She has fused these with ancient beliefs and practices adopted from her study of Goddess-centered and indigenous peoples, including American Indians and Druids. This storytelling method has proven to be both therapeutic and creatively productive, as demonstrated by the writing output and personal growth achieved by dozens of writers who Victoria has taught and mentored. Writers who began their stories by asking a simple yet powerful question… what if?
• What if I had had a different response to the violence that blew up my childhood?
• What if I asked the soul of my unborn child to tell our family story?
• What if I recreated the devastating impact of the Armenian genocide on multiple generations of my family?
In the words of one of her students: “I have an MFA, and I’ve workshopped with many authors over the years, some quite famous. I feel that Victoria’s workshop helped me the most because of her gift of balancing a writer’s personal trauma with the craft of writing.” -Hannah, PA.
From this presentation, you will gain a basic understanding of how Victoria’s unique approach to life writing can repair the psychic wounds that can and often do haunt us all of our lives. In the process, you’ll acquire some solid writing tips to propel your own healing stories onto the page and beyond.
Victoria Costello began her career in journalism and documentary filmmaking, earning an Emmy Award as writer for her Disney Channel TV special, THIS ISLAND EARTH followed by WOLF NATION, a portrait of the Northern Arapaho Wolf Clan on the eve of the restoration of the Gray Wolf to Yellowstone National Park.
She earned an MFA in Writing from Mills College, and worked as a science blog editor for a S.F. research publisher before becoming a full time author and writing teacher. Her debut novel of autofiction, ORCHID CHILD, published by Liminal Books in 2023, won first place in General and Cross Genre Fiction in that year’s Best Book Awards and received a Silver Medal in Visionary Fiction from the IPPY awards. She has taught life writing for the OLLI/SOU program and teaches writers of all levels with Zoom classes in memoir and autofiction at WritingWorkshops.com. She has made her home in Ashland for the past three years.
Presenter’s Website:
http://victoriacostelloauthor.com
RVML’s Full Events Calendar:
https://rvml.org/events
MeetUp Events Page:
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SEE ALSO: RVML’s Annual Halloween Party “Astral Alter Egos” Fri. 10/31
https://rvml.org/event/rvmls-annual-halloween-party-astral-alter-egos/
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