The Collab Salon

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What is a Collab Salon?

Get involved with our monthly webinar when presenters and participants from around the world meet together informally in real time for 1.5 hours. We always meet from 4:00-5:30 pm  (New York time) on the third Sunday of the month. Collab members can also watch the recording at their convenience in our Library of Past Salons, and earn 18 Alliant CE credits. You just need to sign up, check your local time zone, and then come to our Zoom meeting room at the designated time. The Collab is open to people from any discipline/background interested in learning more about narrative practices. If you can, become a Collab Salon member, since our collective membership dues helps with ongoing maintenance and development of our training initiatives.

Alliant International University has approved 18 CE credits for attending and/or viewing each yearly series. Members wishing to earn CEs, pay an additional $40 (per year) and then follow the instructions toward receiving the CE certificate at the end of the calendar year. It's still possible to earn 18 2022 CEs. You just need to become a member, sign up for CEs, and follow the instructions.

With Elena Baskina (Moscow, New York & Miami) Masha Tiunova (Moscow) and Kitty Thatcher (Inverell, NSW,Australia/Santiago, Chile) 

The principles of improv theater (making your partner look and feel good, counting on chaos and uncertainty, showing up for the moment) seem to be relevant to the current collective moment where there is still a lot of uncertainty. We became curious whether improv wisdom ideas and practices can go hand in hand with narrative therapy, counseling contexts and community work. We decided to talk to narrative practitioners from all over the world about their experiences around improvisation. This Salon will showcase the highlights of those conversations, provide space for reflections and new practices to emerge and, hopefully, give us an opportunity to play some improv games relevant to our work contexts. It also gives a glimpse at Masha and Elena's upcoming Consultation Group:  Engaging an Audience: Bridging Narrative Practice & Applied Theatre.

with Daniel Angus & Marko Turner (Sydney, Australia)

This Salon will showcase highlights from our shared passion project of several years: the scouring for and nurturance of those unique client superpowers that can encourage courageous imaginations.  Building on the centrality of the narrative practice pantheon, we will share our uses of imaginative Know-How and inspirations from Narrative Therapy Wonderland. Client story examples will include, officiating mother-daughter family reunions, the case of the talking shower cricket, the protest power of panic attacks, and the giant misunderstood tarantula.

With Poh Lin Lee (Quebec City, Canada)

What happens when we shift from viewing our bodies as a single entity to experiencing our bodies as a community of diverse members each with their own experience, position and stories? In this Collab Salon, Poh will share experiential exercises and stories of practice to discuss the possibilities that flow from a multi-storied invitation to our bodies to participate - with specific attention to consent and practices ‘with’ rather than ‘on’. These practices have been co-produced in conversations across diverse contexts and in response to experiences of displacement, injustice, and exclusion.

With Merle Conyer (Sydney, Australia) and Jenny Freeman (Berkeley, California USA)

Today’s young people are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Significant disruptions are predicted, as they navigate more frequent extreme weather events, in parallel with major lifestyle and community changes as we move to a zero-carbon economy. Research is identifying how deeply concerned many young people are about what they will face in their future in both the global north and south. How might we in the narrative community offer safe and compassionate spaces for children and young people to voice their concerns, be heard, and have their feelings validated and respected? There is a role for young people to be energized and active in addressing the climate emergency and it is important that we walk alongside them to be part of the solutions.

With SuEllen Hamkins (Northampton, Massachusetts, USA), Lynne Rosen (Pasadena, California USA) & Navid Zamani (San Diego, California USA)

This Collab Salon brings forward the research and approaches of SuEllen Hamkins, Lynne Rosen, and Navid Zamani as they consider the ethics and effects of love and imagination, and the helpful-ness of attunement. Presenters will outline some of their theoretical assumptions, its intersection with broader social justice ethics and values, and the life that these practices breathe in our relationships with those who consult us. Their conversation gives a sneak preview of the new series now in development: Narrative Therapy, Trauma & the Affective Turn. 

With Walter Bera (Austin, Texas, USA), Maggie Carey (Adelaide, Australia), David Epston (Aukland, NZ), Sarah Beth Hughes (Nelson BC, Canada, Peggy Sax  (Vermont, USA) and others

In this Collab, we remember Michel White who died in April 2008. We bring together a number of people lucky enough to know Michael personally to talk with each other about memories, Michael’s legacy and what lies ahead. Further details coming.

 With Akansha Vaswani-Bye (Seattle, Washington USA) & Rocio Ocampo-Giancola (San Diego, California USA)

Rocio and Akansha extended the following invitation to participants in a Re-Authoring Teaching Consultation Group from January-April 2023."Are you feeling a sense of isolation and disenchantment in your work? Do you feel you are being recruited into stories of dominant ideas of what a “good therapist” is or stories that are pathologizing of the people who consult you? We invite you to resist these stories and ideas in this community consultation group and think together about what you would prefer your practice to embody."In this Salon they will share stories and ideas that group members generated for further circulation and co-sparking.

 With Elena Grebenyuk & Marat Khachatryan (KRAI, Moscow-Lisbon)

How can we teach Narrative therapy in a way which responds to its philosophy and ethics? How can Narrative therapy change and develop in our collaborations and engaging with new ideas? How can we work together in the team paying attention to power relationships? How can we be narrative practitioners in the actual political situation in Russia and in the world? When we started our project, KRAI, together with our colleagues, we were drawn to these questions and a lot more. We’ve developed a diverse yearlong program on Narrative therapy and community work as long as other laboratories and workshops. We are glad to share our experience at the Collab salon.

With Sarah Beth Hughes (Nelson, BC Canada)

In this Collab on using re-membering practices in writing, we will explore ideas on team development to use to connect you to the people that support you to be the therapist/ teacher/ person you want to be and to help clients with their teams.  We will work with some writing prompts to put this into practice, to see who we long to talk with and what you hope they might ask us about. We will exchange with others who may have had experience in this area of practice.

With Kay Ingamells & David Epston (Auckland, New Zealand)

Our new online series, Where the Buses Don't Run Yet, is being constructed around edited conversations between David Epston and Kay Ingamells.  This Collab focuses on two imaginative practices covered in these courses: Internalized Other Interviewing and Hauntings from the Future. Illustrating with training interviews, David takes advantage of pedagogical circumstances to demonstrate using the future as a playground in narrative conversations.

with Julie Welkowitz, Diane Gottlieb, Linda Wackerman, Krista Reinke, & Linda Li (Burlington, Vermont, USA)

The Vermont Center for Narrative Practice (VCNP) has been utilizing a narrative reflecting team consultation model that incorporates the 4 part “Retelling” process outlined by Michael White (2005, p. 190)¹ for outsider witnesses: 1) Expression 2) Image 3) Personal Resonance 4) Transport.  Through our conversation together at the Collab Salon, our aim is to share our experiences as a team, particularly with the processes of resonance and transport and to learn how participants have also incorporated these elements into their own narrative practices (whether through reflecting teams or not). It is our hope that this dialogue will foster new understandings of these mechanisms and move us to consider different ways of incorporating these outsider witness practices into our work with others.

With Piper Clyborne (Seattle Washington USA), Ava Elmzadeh (Southern California USA), and Marcy Rivas (Seattle, Washington USA)

 What are the lost stories as yet untold, for which we’ve never been asked?  During an interview or therapeutic conversation, have you ever thought… “I don’t know about that, but there’s a different question I want to answer?”  Have you ever thought to yourself…. “I’ve thought about such and such, and no one has asked me about this.  I think I would really like to develop that story and have a witness for that type of conversation…” We are hoping to open some space when people can talk about questions they wish they would be or would have been asked and why that question?  This is not really a workshop to learn how to ask better questions, though there are likely to be new or different questions to be gathered.  It’s a chance for us to get together and get off our chests a few of the questions that we would like to be asked.  It’s an opportunity for the telling of some of our stories, and to do so in our own manner. Please bring two questions you wish you could be or would have liked to have been asked.

With Amy Druker (Toronto, Canada)

Are you meeting with people who are living with Despair? Or where problem stories or descriptions have taken over a person’s identity, and/or where systemic, structural and/or institutional forms of oppression have contributed to ‘totalized identity conclusions’? (eg. I’m a Troublemaker, I’m Too Damaged To Be In A Relationship, There’s Something Wrong With Me’). What guides your approach to conversations with people facing Despair, or where a person’s identity has been overtaken by a problem story? Amy Druker will share an attempt at a letter-writing campaign with a young person who was (at the time of the proposed letter-writing campaign) surviving within the carceral system, and what emerged when a “roadblock” was encountered.  Amy will share a recorded interview with a friend of the young person who was surviving time inside, who participated in the project of helping her friend reclaim his life from Despair and Hopelessness.

With Ian Percy (Perth, Australia)

In the final Collab for the year, Ian invites us to reflect on the experience, the effects, and the practice of inspiration. He will guide us to focus on:  Recalling and honouring an experience of inspiration during the past year and Imagining possible experiences of inspiration during the year to come.