Flexing Your Creative Muscles: Using Storytelling to Stretch & Release
Week of November 30, 2024
“Flexing Your Creative Muscles: Using Storytelling to Stretch & Release” is a series of writing workshops inspired by Jennifer Harris’s diverse experience as a writer, educator, organizational storyteller, and fitness enthusiast! In an era where every day storytelling has been reduced to 280 characters or less, Jennifer sees a growing need to reframe its intrinsic value. She compares writing to running, resting, and eating well, and suggests that writing as a form of storytelling is, in fact, good for our health and wellbeing. “We share a basic human need to flex our creative muscles,” she says, “to move, stretch, and release our inner spirit.” Jennifer likens her workshop experience to an energizing workout: “It may seem hard to get into at first, but if you surrender you can hit a stride, and you will feel empowered after.”
Jennifer believes that storytelling is primal, that we are wired for story, and that writing is a wellness practice we can all access. By designing exercises that warm up the mind and root writers in their bodies, Jennifer takes participants inward in an effort to draw stories outward. Her philosophy is simple: every person is a writer and every writer deserves a safe place to learn, experiment, share, and receive. Writing in this way will ignite connection and community, and will nourish your mind, body, and spirit.
Join Jennifer for an evening program that will invite dialogue around the “science of story” and will introduce writing as a wellness practice. She will host three 50 minute guided-writing sessions thereafter that allow participants to engage more deeply in the therapeutic power of storytelling.
Jennifer Harris is a San Diego-based entrepreneur who has spent over two decades writing and storytelling across sectors. A graduate of University of Chicago’s Master of the Arts Program in the Humanities and UC Davis’s undergraduate program in English and Creative Writing, Jennifer has built a career applying creative thinking and writing techniques to the fields of education, arts and culture, health and environmental sciences, and philanthropy. Over the last decade, Jennifer has produced custom storytelling workshops for hundreds of individuals, associations, and companies, she attained a Certificate in Narrative Health Care from Lenoir Rhyne University, and she is now chair of the board for Health Story Collaborative, a patient-centered, research-based nonprofit organization committed to the therapeutic power of storytelling. Her consultancy, JH Collective, Inc., continues to fuse her personal and professional ethos—an ethos centered on the power of stories; that stories can serve personal growth and healing, develop organizations and business, and preserve communities and histories. On the Web jhcollectiveinc.com. Linkedin: Jennifer Harris