We Are Meaning-Makers

How Creativity Healed Me

Jun 05, 2025

This is a stack about creativity and well-being. Honestly, it’s all the same to me. There is very little well-being for me without creativity.

When I think back on how dis-eased I’ve been, with autoimmune issues and chronic pain from my teen years onward, the shame and ableism that was wrapped inside of that only created more sickness for me.

Once I recognized creativity as a path toward well-being, this became a mechanism for healing. Because with creativity, my life was not and would not be meaningless (how it felt for me when I was sick). I could leverage my creativity to offer something to the world.

Even if the world didn’t want what I was offering, the act of making it (a poem, a song, a play) made me feel useful and gave me a sense of agency in a world that mostly felt like it was often running me down and ignoring my splat body, leaving me to peel myself off the road and re-inflate.

Healing isn’t curing. A cure means the problem goes away. I still take maintenance medication for my Ulcerative Colitis. I still watch my diet like a wedge-tailed eagle (the bird highest ranked for eyesight). I make sure I sleep 8 hours every night and do many things to take good care of myself so that I can remain in remission. And I do feel healed.

Healing means I have listened to my symptoms and let them each shift my view of life itself. In fact, I don’t think I had a way of thinking about life that was about living before I was almost too sick to live. First I had to learn to respect and love myself enough to choose a meaningful life.

Discomfort makes me wonder, how did I get here? Where was I headed? What is whispering to me?

Being able to access the whispering (sometimes screaming in pain) parts has been (and still is) essential for my healing and a return to my wholeness. Don’t we all want our lives to be meaningful? Having purpose and being able to feel a sense of accomplishment and pride (Happy Pride!) is essential.

Creativity is a big part of that. Whether it’s cooking a delicious meal or finding a few minutes a day to journal, or creating a larger, daily creative practice, our limitations and even our pain can be mined for purpose.

I literally built a road for myself out of chronic pain and disease. I am not saying that I have a “plan” or a “design” for healing that works for everyone. I am saying that your healing will be unique for you, and I am here to help anyone who wants a hand with that. Join me!

Structured Surprises!

I just spent 10 weeks teaching “Structure is Not a Dirty Word” for the Dramatists Guild Institute and PlayPenn, and 10 week is not enough. There is so much to play with when it comes to Structure, and it’s so much fun! Here is an exercise we didn’t do, but I miss having not done. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

We live in structures (homes), and we write in structures (forms that hold meaning). A sentence has a subject and a verb, sometimes an object or indirect object, etc. They can be right-branching or left-branching… A story has a beginning, middle, end. A joke has expectation and irony. A poem has form, meter, metaphor, metonymy, a shape, sometimes stanzas. A play or screenplay has rising action, conflict, a moment of recognition that might lead to a reversal…

Surprise yourself by playing with structure mixing and matching as it suits your subject matter. For example: write a monologue for a character in praise of something low or nasty (or against something everyone loves); create a scene that begins with the characters dug into one position and have them dug out and changing sides by the end; write a scene where the protagonist is full of longing but shot down by the antagonist every which way until the protagonist changes completely (start with the mundane and end with the palatial, or begin with the impossible and end with the carpet).

Create a story that takes place in a Museum of ______ or a Hall or Ministry of _____ (something strange we don't expect like Fear or Jealousy). Create a Proof (like a manuscript, scientific experiment or a newly discovered archeological marvel) that proves something, finds a lost civilization or cures a social problem.

Write a scene where a character gives instructions on how to do something taken to an absurd level of specificity. Go far beyond what anyone would normally do (describing the motion of stirring for example). Or write the unmaking of something as a metaphor.

Whatever you decide to work on, see what happens when you enlarge the structure or squeeze it tightly shut. Make it happen faster or slower, larger, smaller, verbosely or succinctly. Play and surprise yourself!

Brave Group Coaching is Back!

The 6-week Introductory Brave Group Coaching Course starts July 10th, Thursdays at 7pm ET (time zone converter here)!

It is possible to self-regulate and ground, even in these difficult times. It is possible to move past feelings of helplessness even while American, neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill, and/or in chronic pain.

This is affordable coaching in a small group with kindness for however you want to show up, camera on or off, etc.

The practices I’m teaching shifted the needle for me. Small incremental changes are possible, and they help more than you’d imagine. Or I wouldn’t be here in remission for 5 autoimmune diseases, functioning without chronic pain.

Advanced Brave Group Coaching Returns

twice a month on Tuesdays at 12pm ET (time zone converter here) starting July 8th, then July 29th, August 12th and 26th.

Neuro-Affirming (NAF) Parts Work Group:

Meets Second Saturdays of each month to offer community, parts work experience and support for anyone interested who is neurodivergent (inclusive of many different ways to be neurodivergent including Autism, ADHD, Audhd, OCD, cPTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and more). Run by Emma and Jess, both of us Audhd, we are creating Parts Work content for healing and ease in neurodivergent systems. Sign up for our link here. Our next meeting is 12pm ET (time zone converter here) Saturday, June 14th. Sliding scale from $5-25/session.

artwork by Scott Sherman at ScottShermanStudio on Instagram

Amazing People Doing Amazing Things:

If you want to be listed here, please let me know what you’re up to and include your links!

For example, I’m still waiting to hear from two shortlists, so keep your fingers crossed for me! My flash fiction, “Appetites,” made it into Best MicroFictions 2025 and will drop in July at this link!

Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre is producing the World Premiere of Iraq, But Funny which follows five generations of Assyrian women attempting to reclaim their story as it’s being narrated by some British guy. Written by Atra Asdou, this journey from the Ottoman Empire to modern-day U.S.A. is filled with history, family, dysfunction, razor-sharp wit, and off-the-wall humor, culminating in a riotous reckoning you won’t want to miss! Directed by the amazing Dalia Ashurina who directed my play/podcast Abraham’s Daughters. Previews start on May 29th and runs June 7 through July 20th.

Audrey Cephaly has written a great Substack on How to Write the 10 Minute Play - I highly recommend her Substack every day, and especially this one.

Take a Poetry Workshop with Only Poems.

For those of us who want to start submitting to literary magazines, here’s a post by Katie Manning, editor of Whale Road Review discussing it.

Playwrights! If you’re not already subscribed to Mark Ravenhill’s free newsletter for his 101 exercises for playwrights, you might want to click here to do that. If you’ve missed them, reach out and I’ll send you a pdf of the 1st 53, and a pdf of 54 - now. So you won’t have to search through the endless Twitter-verse for random entries.

If you are struggling with the news, try this article about resistance.

Opportunities:

Centre Theatre New Play Festival wants new plays! Submit by June 30th!

Moxie Theatre seeks new plays Submit by June 30th! All plays must be written by women+ playwrights. For musicals, at least two thirds of the writing team must identify as women+ (in a team of two people, both must identify as women+) Submissions are now open for ten-minute plays, full-length plays, and full-length musicals. They recommend 6 or fewer characters.

Ixion is seeking up to 8 scripts where DEFIANCE figures prominently to be considered for further development, including staged readings and possibly full production in June of 2026. No more than 4 actors. Simple setting. No more than 12 pages. Include only first initial and last name of author. Put script name and your last name in header or footer. Multiple subs allowed. No bios. Send to ixionensemble@gmail.com by 5 p.m. 9/30/25. Defiance can be in any form or any situation to explore relationships, dynamics and moments where opposition comes into play, could take on the relationship between a parent and child, and individual versus a collective or even a people versus an entity.

Telephone seeks all kinds of creative folks from everywhere in the world to respond to other artists/poets/dancers/etc to create a global community of responses. It is a massively brilliant project (I contributed to), and they want all kinds of creatives involved especially outside the US and especially filmmakers and musicians. Check out what they are doing and reach out!

Women in the Arts & Media have a list of opps you can sign up to get monthly.

For poets, Two Sylvias Weekly Muse is a great community with classes and more! They are offering an Online Poetry Retreat this summer and early fall.

Brave Space

With prompts, grounding practices, & discussions, Brave Space invites playwrights, poets, painters, potters, novelists, memoirists, musicians & artists working in any medium to make meaning in a safe community. Begin and/or bring your projects to completion. Or use Brave Space as a body-doubling space to get other things done in community. $5-25 suggested per session. 4+x/week! On or off camera. No commitment, drop-ins welcome. Try it!

Brave Space Schedule:

Mondays & Wednesdays at 12pm ET; Fridays at 12pm ET w/fast feedback; and Sundays at 6pm ET with Sharing Second Sundays at 730pm ET (that means June 8th!!!) Email or reply below for a link!

No Brave Space Friday June 6th.