Using Poetry and Expressive Writing – Episode 56

In this episode, host Beth Cougler Blom talks with Marisa Gelfusa about how poetry and expressive writing can become powerful tools for facilitators to connect with themselves and with others.

Beth and Marisa also talk about:

  • Using poetry as a reflexive practice in facilitation
  • Breaking through the inner critic with playful, accessible prompts
  • Creating safe spaces where participants share their writing out loud
  • Using poetry with healthcare professionals, patients, and educators
  • Incorporating poetic inquiry into educational research

Engage with Marisa Gelfusa

Links From the Episode

*When Marisa went to look for the University of Iowa’s teaching philosophy statement website, they had modified it, so she has offered this link instead.

Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast

Connect with Beth Cougler Blom

Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions

Show Transcript

[Upbeat music playing]

[Episode intro]
Beth 00:02
Hi there, I’m Beth Cougler Blom, and this is Facilitating on Purpose, the space where we talk about designing and facilitating learning. In this episode, I chat with my friend and colleague Marisa Gelfusa.

Beth 00:14
Marisa is not only a friend, she was one of the people I interviewed when I wrote my book Design to Engage. I interviewed people all over Canada, and I interviewed Marisa because I knew her from when she worked at Volunteer Toronto, and I worked at Volunteer Victoria.

Beth 00:31
We had met many years earlier in Montreal for a wonderful meeting of people who coordinated training programs at volunteer centres, which is what we did earlier in our careers. And ever since that point, Marisa and I had kept in touch, and I interviewed her to get her thoughts and contributions to Design to Engage. So she is featured in that book.

Beth 00:56
Well, I was catching up with Marisa recently, and she told me that in the master’s degree in educational studies that she’s pursuing, she’s looking at using poetry. And we got talking about that, and then it just evolved into this, hey, why don’t we do an episode about using poetry and expressive writing in our facilitation practice?

Beth 01:16
Both for ourselves to be a reflexive practice for us as facilitators, but also that we can use it in the room with our students or our participants, whoever we’re working with.

Beth 01:29
The interesting thing is that poetry sometimes gets a bad rap, doesn’t it? Because it’s not always understandable to all of us, and sometimes it feels inaccessible. But I think if you listen to this episode with Marisa and hear how she’s using poetry in the classroom, and how she’s using expressive writing techniques outside of academia, I should stress, that it becomes just a little easier for us to think about how to do this in our own work, in our workshops, in our sessions, and maybe how it could support our own practice as facilitators as well. So here is Marisa Gelfusa, my friend and colleague, and I hope you enjoy the show.

[Episode start]
Beth 02:12
To prepare for this, I listened a little bit to the interview that I did with you when I interviewed you for my book.

Marisa 02:20
Oh my gosh, that was a long time ago.

Beth 02:23
It was a long time ago. It was in 2019. And one of the neat things was—I didn’t listen to it all, I think I listened to about 15 or 20 minutes. But one of the neat things you said was that as a facilitator, you become a bridge. And I thought that’s so neat and it’s so apropos for our conversation today because you’re now this bridge to all of us, I think, for this particular topic, which is really new to me.

Beth 02:51
I don’t think a lot about poetry. I don’t use a lot of poetry in my work. And I think a lot of people would be saying the same things. Let’s talk about what that bridge is that you want to make for folks today. Like why poetry? And how did you become excited about it?

Marisa 03:07
Yeah. So no one is more surprised than me than I’m writing poetry. I think that because of my own background, there wasn’t a lot of poetry at the house and even just learning about it.

Marisa 03:19
And I thought about this and there’s a poem by Billy Collins that’s amazing called Introduction to Poetry and I wonder if I could read you a couple of lines about it.

Beth 03:31
Sure.

Marisa 03:31
So he starts and he says, I asked them, so he’s teaching, so it’s called Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins. “I asked them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a colour slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out”, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then he said, “but all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.”

Marisa 04:04
I mean, my understanding of what Billy Collins is saying here is that poetry is something to marvel at, to sort of take a walk in. You know, it’s not a triathlon. You don’t have to get a gold medal. Poetry really works when you can take it inside yourself. I think most poets would be very happy to learn that, you know, you took a walk around their poem, it meant something to you. Or one of the images worked for you or that kind of thing.

Marisa 04:38
And so I think there’s a lot of baggage around poetry that’s really unfortunate because poetry is such an amazing way to distill authentic voice. And it doesn’t mean that, you know, the best poetry is the stuff that you wrote in 10 minutes. You know, like, certainly, oh, in my opinion, right…So we’re talking about poetry from my perspective, because my relationship to poetry is in how it helps me connect with myself, how it helps me connect with others, and how I can use it to facilitate for people to understand things about each other and to understand things about themselves. That’s the role of a facilitator. And to me, poetry is the great facilitator.

Beth 05:33
Wow, that’s such a neat thing. So when you use it, are you writing poetry as well or are you using it as a device for those ways that you mentioned or both?

Marisa 05:44
So, all those things. I use poetry in a lot of ways. So I use poetry as a reflexive tool. So to figure out what’s going on, I agree that it’s a muscle, right?

Marisa 05:57
And that like, and I agree and every, every, every, every single facilitation I’ve ever done around writing and poetry, you know, the critic is, is, you know, my critic comes out, sits on my shoulder: “That’s a terrible prompt. What do you know? Nobody’s going to relate to that!” Whatever.

Marisa 06:16
And then I can see, right, when, when you give a prompt to people, and then I can see the, there’s a thing that comes over people’s faces, you know, the, the freeze, the I don’t know how to do this, what am I going to say, or it’s stupid, or what have you. But the thing is, is that if we keep going, you know, if I just say to you, well, we’re going to write, right now we’re going to write.

Marisa 06:45
I have, I sometimes use pictures and say, we’re going to write, I have a really funny picture of a lady who squished in a phone booth with three or four of her kids. And she’s on the phone, right? And I say, well, you know, we’re going to write for seven minutes on this picture, anything like who is this lady? What’s happening? Do you know her? Did you know her? That kind of thing.

Marisa 07:10
And they just start writing. Two things like the time crunch, the, you know, you have seven minutes, you know, that helps. And we also make jokes about the critic, we say, okay, send to, you know, tell your critics to go to Starbucks and get you a coffee, or, you know, or something more local, actually, [they laugh] and get you a coffee, you know, so that you can get on with writing.

Marisa 07:35
And, you know, the critic never goes away. But we, I mean, it’s a myth, right? To think, one day, I’m going to sit down, you know, my heart’s gonna open up, I’m going to write this perfect thing. The thing is that you’re always just writing as yourself, right?

Marisa 07:51
Actually, I have a favourite, really great quote by an American poet that says, “a poem’s power in here is less in its conclusions than its propensity to resist them.” That means that it’s so suited to human expression, because we are so many things at the same time, right? And poems with their strategies, like spaces and words and sounds and the word choices and that kind of thing, you know, they’re concise and they’re distilled nature.

Marisa 08:30
I do find, and so many things live in one poem. But then furthermore, in my workshops, in the writing workshops that I do, I run a creative writing workshop at, at a cancer centre for people who have received a cancer diagnosis. One of the things that we do is we read out loud. Okay, you just wrote this thing, it’s a draft, you just like, whatever, you’re not a writer. And now you have to read it in front of 10, 12 people out loud. That’s incredible. Like, you know, first of all, you cultivate this deep listening, you know, because you’re listening to the person without judgment. I always say like, we’re not here, you know, this is not Penguin Publishing, no one has submitted a thing. But this deep listening happens.

Marisa 09:27
And anything that you write, sometimes people write about funny things, all of us laugh, but we receive it with generosity. And what happens is that any, you know, baggage around what you were going to say is gone. Because now it’s free, and you’ve said it, right?

And the workshops, the objective of the workshops is to set aside some time to connect with your authentic voice. You know, that’s who we want to hear from in the workshop.

Beth 10:05
Yeah, so it’s not necessarily a writing workshop. You’re not saying these are the eight skills of writing and please use them and blah, blah, blah. Not anything like that. [Marisa: No.] It’s really a method or mode of self-expression, a way to get them to be honest with themselves and share that with others?

Marisa 10:23
Yes, but also share this beauty and these beautiful things that we all have and that we all can say and this unique experience that we have. You know, we have a unique experience, but it’s like poetry helps us. And Sandra Faulkner said this, she’s a researcher and a poet. She says that what poetry does is it takes unique experiences. We’re all able to relate to them universally.

Marisa 10:56
So in terms of, sorry, just back to facilitation. So in terms of facilitation, I use poetry one as a reflexive tool. I use it for myself. And one of the things that I did that might be of interest to other facilitators is that I started by writing my teaching philosophy statement. I had been doing a lot of gigs. I love my gigs, you know.

Marisa 11:21
But sometimes and I was listening to a couple of your podcasts and kind of, you know, understood, like we sometimes you have to do gigs that, you know, are more or less related to your sense of values or stuff like that. And sometimes that can take you away from what you came here to do in the first place. This is hard work. It’s hard to be a facilitator. It’s hard to be in front of everybody and keep, you know, hold space for everybody and keep eyes on everybody and who’s bored and who’s who’s this working for? And, you know, are we getting to the objectives? Am I going to make my time?

Marisa 12:03
You know, those are all the things that we do. So at the very least, you know, if we are able to be fulfilling, if we feel like we’re walking in tandem with our value or the thing that we came to do in collaboration with the participants, then that’s really is a surefire way to beat compassion fatigue or whatever facilitators get, you know?

Beth 12:28
You mentioned your teaching philosophy statement. So did that lead you to poetry or did you write it in a poetic style or…?

Marisa 12:36
No, I wrote it…I followed some kind of University of Iowa guideline because I think you have to submit one when you apply for teaching positions. I wasn’t applying, but I wanted to write a teaching philosophy statement. So yeah, I wrote it.

Marisa 12:53
And then I pulled out, this is an exercise anybody can do, is you take a highlighter and you highlight all the important parts of what you just wrote. And then you can pull it out and make a poem with that. Or by moving words around, cutting words, you know, that kind of thing.

Marisa 13:16
But what I did was I wrote a whole other poem because I realized that the reason I was a facilitator, that that had to do so much with the gratitude I had for, you know, my journey and my parents, even though they had very little education, you know. And how right they were and how that’s not always recognized. So I wrote a poem about that.

And that was very clarifying to me about, you know, like, I could always go into a session with my value right in front of mind. What am I doing here? What did I come here to do? You know?

Beth 13:57
I’m thinking about the word reflexive [Marisa: Yes] because I literally had to look it up again to go, yeah, what is the difference between reflective and reflexive? Can you talk a little bit more about that, like how is writing or how is poetry reflexive for you? What is it giving you?

Marisa 14:15
Right. So reflexive is when you’re reflecting, but you’re feeding it back to yourself to be to make yourself better. So it’s a practice where you’re always, you’re looking at what you’re doing, you’re thinking about it, and you’re applying whatever you think are ways that you might do that better.

And so that’s what poetry does, right? Because you have poetry, you kind of you write it down, you play with it. And also a lot of it is, and this only came to me like after a while of doing it, but after a certain time, it just emerges, it comes up, but you gotta, it’s just a matter of allowing it and practicing that.

Beth 15:00
Yeah. You have it come more naturally to you or something.

Marisa 15:06
That’s right, yeah. Or it takes less time to get the critic out of the way and for you to sit down. And what happens is that you can access that part of yourself much more easily.
If it’s not the first time you open the door and it’s jammed and rusted.

Beth 15:22
You said before that no one was more surprised than you, that you came to poetry. Can you say a little bit more about that? Why…were you resistant at first? Did it kind of hit you in the head and you didn’t realize it was coming? [smiles]

Marisa 15:35
Well, mostly I have to say [chuckles] that I couldn’t relate to poetry, right? I couldn’t relate to it. I liked short stories. I wrote a lot of short stories and that kind of thing. But I also had this idea about what it had to be until, unfortunately, my cousin was passing and she was at palliative care. And there were only a couple of us that were available to care for her. So it was a big, big emotional load. And there wasn’t too many people to discuss that with. So I had to find a way to process and I couldn’t sit there and write a short story. So I had a little notebook while I was sitting with my cousin as she was passing and just wrote like, wrote a couple of poems every day, like as we were there, like we’d split 12 hour shifts. And that’s just how it went, you know?

Beth 16:34
Yeah, it served you at the time, it sounds like. Yeah. [Marisa: It did.] Yeah, you needed it?

Marisa 16:39
Yes that’s right. And all I did, I didn’t do anything crazy. I just wrote what I was thinking you know? Like and because I was just like sitting there a long time I just wrote what I was thinking.

Beth 16:54
And you knew you didn’t have to share it with anybody [Marisa: That’s right.] maybe at that moment too, hey? Like it was just for you?

Marisa 16:59
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Beth 17:01
Yeah. But what do you, it makes me think about the participants though. I mean, so you knew you could keep it private in those moments as you were learning and practicing and growing in it. But you said with the cancer centre folks, they will share. What do you do? I mean, you’re making a comfortable environment for them to share, but do you have resistors, so to speak? Do you, do you say it’s okay if you don’t [Marisa: Yes.] or how do you kind of navigate that sharing or not?

Marisa 17:28
Well, you know what? I always say it’s all right if you don’t want to share, but nobody never passes. No one has ever passed. Because, you know, so what will sometimes happen is that the people who are either more comfortable with the situation, they will read. And what happens is that everyone else witnesses, you know, like obviously this is something you have to facilitate, like we said.

Marisa 17:52
You know, there’s no talking while the person is reading. I am inviting you to do some really deep listening. Be present. Don’t be writing while the person is reading their work. They’re being very brave and they’re doing something very scary. So we have to honour that. And of course, everybody’s heart is pounding so they know what I’m talking about.

Marisa 17:52
And everyone reads. And then when it’s received, you know, like so warmly, you know, it just does work well. And I want to say like, this is not my idea. It’s a method by Pat Schneider and it’s the AWA method. And Pat Schneider works, well, she worked in, well, she started this whole amazing movement, but she worked in prisons and with different in community organizations, that kind of thing.

Marisa 17:52
She’s the one who brings the voice, you know, and the importance of reading. You know how people say like, everybody has a book in them. Like one day, like everyone’s saying, like one day I’m going to write a book, you know? And it’s because we have it, you know, and we want to say it, you know? And we want to tell it to each other, right? Because that feels really good. Yeah.

Marisa 17:52
And it’s really important. And you’re going to think, okay, so touchy-feely, touchy-feely, okay. But not always. Recently, last year did this exercise at a big, big conference that was full of oncologists and doctors and, you know, chemistry specialists and, you know, and there was like about a hundred people in the room. I was presenting on just some of the work that I did at the cancer centre. And I have to tell you that the person who presented before me was this highly sought after doctor who had found this like fantastic way of controlling pain. And, you know, when her time was up and there were still 20 million questions for her. And then I was going to go up with my thing on poetry. Yeah.

Beth 20:15
Juxtaposition. [They laugh.]

Marisa 20:16
Yeah, and I thought, oh my gosh, you know, but they were kind enough and they heard me out. Then I led them through a poetry exercise, all 100 of them. Presented a poem as a prompt, you know, on kindness, and then asked them to write a short poem on the kindnesses they had experienced or witnessed in their wards. So many people participated.

Marisa 20:42
There were cards on the table. I thought, you know, going to have like three people. So many people participated and actually then I took the cards back and with the help of another doctor sort of pulled out some of them and we wrote a two-page poem that’s actually quite reflective. And the point of that was that at that conference I asked, does anybody want to read, anybody want to read? In front of these hundred other doctors? [Beth laughs: Yeah!] We had lots of people who wanted to read. [Beth: Nice.] Yeah, yeah, and not a dry eye in the place either.

Beth 21:21
Wow, that’s so transformational for, I work a lot in healthcare, you know, with clients in healthcare. And so sometimes we can really get stereotypical [Marisa: Oh yes. 100%] about that type of environment or the didactic nature of, you know, those kinds of conferences or whatever. But you know, anyone that’s kind of listening, that’s in environments where arts-based stuff doesn’t happen [chuckles], I think it tells us that we can. It’s not just at cancer centres with patients, where you might think it’s a little bit more touchy feely or something, right? It’s for everyone.

Marisa 21:56
Right, there’s a woman in Toronto, her name is Ronna Bloom. I read an article where she did this thing and actually healthcare, where people have tons of different perspectives, right? Doctors have one objective, nurses have another objective, peripheral therapies have other objectives, that kind of thing. She runs workshops where they write everybody together a mixed table, where they write from their perspective about what they are trying to do with the patient and what they need from the rest of the team. And then they read it to each other.

Marisa 22:34
It’s hard to have that conversation, right? You can’t just sort of tap somebody on the shoulder and say, hey, Mr. Supervisor, or Mr. Whatever. This is what I’m trying to do. This is what’s important to me. And this is what I really need from you to help me do this.

Beth 22:53
And this is like the enabling factor or enabling method or something to get them there, right? [Marisa: Yes.] Because actually, I think there’s a Liberating Structure that’s similar. I’ve never run it, so I can’t tell you much about it. I’d have to look it up myself, but it’s called What I Need From You. You know, all we need is a facilitator to come in and set a good scene for the group and try to build that trusting environment, don’t we?

Beth 23:07
And then we make an invitation to an activity. You’re making an invitation to write poetry. But as soon as a good facilitator comes in the room and does what we do, we can get people there, can’t we? Even when they’re not used to doing that at all. And so when we make the invitation, most times people do come along and they benefit from it.

Marisa 23:36
Yes, yes, I would say it’s been my experience. And then I always have the you know the caveat of you may not be interested in the prompt or you can just write about whatever’s on your mind right now or if there’s something you’ve been thinking about writing about that’s unrelated to the prompt just write it. There’s a lot of freedom. There’s a lot of agency. That’s what really matters. Yeah.

Beth 24:03
What can it do for the person? Because I had an episode recently about dealing with burnout in my own self and trying to figure out what to do about that. I know a lot of us are in that situation and healthcare for sure. We’re always talking about burnout and trying to mitigate or avoid that. So if you can bring people along on this journey to learn how to use poetry to help themselves, what can it do for them? What can it do for us?

Marisa 24:31
First of all, just carving out that time. What I feel is that a lot of surprises come up when you start writing a poem. Like it’s very, very, it’s not at all unusual that you finish something that you had no idea that you were going to write. That’s about getting things on the page.

Marisa 24:52
One of the things that I do is I have a practice. So during COVID, one of the things I realized that was that with work, caregiving, and all these demands on me, that I was losing this playful part of myself, this part that likes to come out and play and just do whatever. Where there’s lots of freedom and that kind of thing. And so I asked a couple of my friends if they would meet with me twice a week for an hour, rotating prompts, everybody’s like facilitator teachers so that’s, you know.

Marisa 25:32
So rotating prompts. And we’re still writing together, actually, it’s our fifth year together. And so that really helped. And so sometimes the way that that really helped was that, I mean, I learned a lot about what was going on in their lives, without them telling me like, oh, you know, if somebody’s writing about, you know, their kids or that kind of thing, that was really helpful.

Marisa 26:00
But the other way that we as facilitators can support people is, you know, when we facilitate, we invite people to come to specific concepts or tables or ideas, right? And so I think that this is a real force for good. You know, like we’re like one of the Avengers, if you will, because, you know, if you invite people to come to their own strengths, their own resilience, their own abilities, their own skills, because that’s all there, but they might it might not be the first thing they think of, right?

Marisa 26:37
I recently did a facilitation last Friday with some very, and I’m sorry, this is another healthcare example. I hope that’s okay. I just been doing mostly in healthcare, with some nurses who work on very critical cases or pivot nurses. So I was working with the art therapist, and she brought some clay, and they worked with some clay for a few minutes, and she invited them to use the clay to think about, you know, this strength, like what they bring to the work that makes them so strong, you know, that makes them keep going.

Marisa 27:18
And then my part, which is the writing, and which was, you know, when you write it down, you kind of bring it more to the surface. And then the writing part was I asked the nurses to write a letter to themselves from that part. So that the letter starts like, dear, your name, and to say, like, what does that part know about you? What does it know that you can do? What does it know about what where this strength came from? There was a lot of amazing, amazing writing. And I think that, and they said, you know, like, did mention how, you know, how helpful it was to hear from other people too, you know, and to write it. Yeah.

Beth 28:05
And share that together. And it sounds like the prompts make such a difference because I must admit, as soon as you said write a letter to themselves, a lot of us have done that over the years, right?

But the difference is in the prompts, isn’t it? [Marisa: Yeah.] Because if you can create a really meaty, juicy, I don’t know what words you would say, what words would you say around how to craft that, that gets them where you hope they would go?

Marisa 28:35
Yeah, I would say like the prompt has to be inviting enough, you know, and it has to be open enough that that people can jump on from anywhere they are.

I use other poems as prompts a lot. Other poems. Like there’s one poem that I use called Some Days, again about resilience, right? It’s a poem about like how some days you have to…well one of the beautiful lines in that poem and I’m sorry I can’t remember the author. It says like some days you have to open the window and let what is inside out and what is outside in. It’s, yeah, it’s a lovely poem.

Marisa 29:22
And you know when you ask people to do that with that poem prompt, it’s like what do you do some days? And so they’ll say like some days you just have to walk by the lake. Some days you just have to, you know, draw the blind. Some days you just have to…that kind of thing. And it’s about bringing out the strength and all that stuff that’s in there. Yeah, that’s really important, that sometimes gets relegated to, you know, number 700, you know.

Beth 29:55
And we don’t share it because we’re so used to the small talk and, you know, especially when people get in together and meet each other for the first time in workshops. I mean, how much do you really divulge of what’s going on in your real life? You know, all the, all the things you’re not going to divulge it all, but at least it’s an entry into sharing something, isn’t it?

Marisa 30:15
Yes, and what’s really important is if you’re going to facilitate using writing is do not start with, you know, the hardest thing I ever had to confront in my life, you know?

Beth 30:24
Yeah. [They chuckle]

Marisa 30:24
Not that. I always have like a two-minute write where I say like, write where you’re coming from or write what you had for breakfast, or write about, you know, the weirdest teacher you ever had. And then we do a round of reading there. So it’s not scary, right?

We start by reading, you know, this morning, I had oatmeal, I wanted oat milk, but there was none left, yada, yada, yada, whatever. So we start there. And then we just work our way to, you know, other prompts, which are not always like heavy, sometimes they’re really funny. And yeah.

Beth 31:02
Yeah, I love that. What do you say about process versus product?

Because you might think on the face of it, a participant might go, Oh, I don’t want to create a poem, or I don’t know how to create a poem. But really, it almost feels like you’re not saying that it’s like the main point is not to create a poem, right? [laughs] It’s to get them to do all that inner reflexive thinking and work, right? Like, is that that’s the most important part for you, is it?

Marisa 31:32
Well, it’s to make space for that voice. If I feel like we’ve been able to do that together, so it’s to make space for that voice and to feel like it can be put out in the world. Those are my two objectives, right?

Marisa 31:50
Do you know, I have to tell you that a lot of the work, and I mean, you know, I’m not an editor like for Random House, like I don’t edit, you know, whatever. I have to tell you that depending where you’re coming from, the work that gets produced in these environments is like, like if we were able to get in there, is very authentic and valuable and very beautiful. Like, does it have, you know, 14 lines? Is it the perfect sestina? Is it that blah, blah, blah? I’m not that concerned about it because, you know, people who want to do that are doing that, that’s fine. There’s courses for that. But that’s not why we’re using writing or poetry here.

Marisa 31:56
The way that we’re using writing and poetry is to get people to really hear themselves and to hear others and to share it with others. And that works like, yeah, like it works in a cancer patient environment but it works in a work environment too. Like it doesn’t, again, like as facilitators, we understand like, you know, we can see the invisible lines about where we can invite people to go, you know, in particular environments to keep it safe and to keep it from getting awkward or what have you.

Beth 33:19
You mentioned editing. I’m actually taking editing courses right now. I’m in the middle of an editing certificate. And one of the neatest things, I think it might have been in the plain language course I just took a few weeks ago, I ended it. I think the instructor said something like, we have to identify our audience for writing, right?

Beth 33:41
And a big mistake that professors or facilitators or whoever, whatever we call ourselves could make when giving the invitation to the student or to the participant is we don’t tell them who to write for. So they just write for the professor or the instructor, right? [Marisa: Yes.] They’re just writing, they’re thinking, oh, this is the audience for this thing that I’m writing. But actually, we’re always thinking in other contexts, there’s a patient out there that’s going to read it, or there’s a whoever out there that’s going to read it. There’s a different audience that’s going to read the thing so professors have to be more clear when they’re giving instructions about who to write for. But actually, you’re talking about people writing to themselves it feels like most of all, in a way?

Marisa 34:26
Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Beth 34:28
Or for themselves. Maybe I should say it that way.

Marisa 34:31
Yes, to, for, about. You know, all those things. Because and but there’s a there’s a purpose there. It’s because what you said, when you pull away, no a good poem rhymes, no a good poem uses these types of words, no a good poem, you know, whatever, when you pull that away. And I mean, these things, it’s craft, and it’s important, right? However, you know, it’s craft, and it’s important, but it’s nothing if the poem doesn’t have a heart, you know?

Beth 35:05
Yeah, and again, back to purpose, why are you doing it? Are you doing it to get published in the most famous poetry or literary magazine there is, or are you doing it to work through something or to share your experience?

Marisa 35:18
In this case it’s not a skills-based activity. But I do want to talk about a little bit about poetic inquiry, and that’s like using poetry in research.

Beth 35:29
Yeah, and wanted to talk about your master’s a little bit. Will you share?

Marisa 35:33
Sure, sure. So, I’m going to be doing some research, I’m doing a master’s in educational studies, and my thesis topic is adults returning to education. And one of the things, one of the reasons that I wanted to do it on there is A, I am an adult who has returned to education again and again and again, and I think you and I were talking about like how life fixes it so you know, it takes a while [laughs] to do that.

Marisa 36:04
But I also wanted to write it because I was when you read about adults returning to education you read a lot about adults returning to education for financial purposes. To get a better job or to get another job or to keep the job they have—that kind of thing. And I think that anyone who’s returned to education knows that when you go back to school your whole life takes another colour, you know, there’s a whole other vibe. Everything is affected. Everything, you know, in your home, yourself, your environment, that kind of thing. And what I know about poetic inquiry is that it, it offers. So I didn’t want to do like statistics there or just say like, What kept you from going back to school? What kept you, you know what pushed you to go back to school? That kind of thing. I wanted to have a conversation with people and I wanted to offer up this thing about where you know all these conflicting truths exist at the same time.

Marisa 37:09
And I can do that using poetic inquiry. So poetic inquiry is when you use poetry to handle research data. So, you can use it to generate data, analyze data, disseminate data, all kinds of things. So, what they do say I just want to just really swing back to where you were talking about skill, skill and writing. One of the things that they do say like people say this. Like people who do poetic inquiry say that it’s really helpful if you have some schooling. If you know how to do poetry. If you’re able to then write a, you know, a good poem to deliver your research. I think that they have a point too. But I’ve also seen people who are by no means poets you know do community work with poetry and writing and arts-based approaches, all kinds of people, you know, peers and stuff like that.

Marisa 38:16
In my opinion, like if the poem works, you know, if you’re able to communicate it, then that’s the main thing. Yeah, so I’m really looking forward to it. The research is, I’ll be interviewing some people who returned to school in different post-secondary, vocational, you know, and even just literacy context. Then do some interviews. And then from the interviews, I’m going to pull and make a poem.

Beth 38:53
Is it going to be incredibly long? I mean, it’s a thesis. [Marisa laughs.] I’m like the whole poem…tell me more! [laughs]

Marisa 39:01
It will not be a thesis because I’m pretty sure that’s not gonna fly. [smiles]

Beth 39:04
Okay. So it’s interspersed by regular paragraphs of text [Marisa: That’s right.] that you would normally do. [Marisa: Yes, yes.] Okay. Yeah.

Marisa 39:09
Yes. So what’s going to be is I will take the data—in my particular thesis—is I’ll take the data and create a poem with the data.

And then what I’m going to do is so one of two things, right? And it depends on the participants, right? Again, because I’m gonna I think I’m going to lose a couple of people when I say like, Oh, this involves poetry. [laughs]

Beth 39:35
[laughs] You got to get ahead of it somehow, yeah.

Marisa 39:38
Yes, yeah, definitely, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to invite people. So I can either pull what I consider to be the important sentences and make poems with the verbatim sentences, or I’m going to invite the participants to co-create with me if they would like. We can look at their interview, like they can highlight, and then we can build the poem together, which I would love to do, but which my supervisor says is going to take forever. [They laugh.]

Beth 40:15
Yeah. I guess it depends how fast you can co-create together, but that sounds more meaningful.
You can go to a deeper depth, I suppose, together, right? And get it right a little bit more because they could look at a word and go, no, that’s not the right word. I don’t want to say that.

Marisa 40:31
100% There’s always member check, right? It’s like back and forth. Like is this poem saying what you were saying? Like what is right about it? Where is it like wrong, that kind of thing.

So because it really has to be representative of the data. And because this is a qualitative study, the data expert is the speaker, is the participant.

Beth 40:57
Yeah. I’m thinking about all the diverse range of people that you might interview and what it looks like to do that where people might, they might speak English as an additional language. They might be from completely different cultures from each other. On and on and on, right? And so what does that look like? That’s really interesting.

Yeah. And to almost meta analyze how they engaged with the process or something as well.

Marisa 41:23
Yes, yes, definitely. Definitely.

You know, I knew this was the method for me when I read, I was reading some research on some, on women who had lived with methamphetamine addiction. I remember that the two researchers, oh gosh, and now I can’t remember their names, I apologize. They did that, like based on the interview, and I think with the help of the participant, they made a very short poem and I read that poem and I could relate to it so much. I related to it. I’ve never had, I’ve never been in that situation. We had very different lives and yet, just by using her words and by making, like by shaping it into, you know, something that accessible to me and something also that was beautiful, even though parts of it were quite sad, I couldn’t believe how, like I thought, like I understand or I feel like I have a better understanding of this woman’s life now and why, you know, what she must have been thinking. And I thought, wow, that’s amazing, because there was so, was such a, so far away. Yeah.

Beth 42:41
And how often does beautiful or the word beauty come up in our environments, right?

Whether they’re post-secondary or healthcare or corporate or nonprofit or whatever, we don’t really think a lot about connecting with each other around emotional beauty or however we might say it, right? That’s a really lovely thing that people can do with and for each other too.

Marisa 43:07
Yeah, yeah. And it was beautiful, because it was so honest. Like, this lady wasn’t trying to, wasn’t trying to do anything. She was just, was just honest, you know, and sad, you know, but very beautiful in it’s honesty.

Beth 43:27
Marisa, if someone’s listening to this and they’re thinking, okay, you’ve convinced me. I think I’m going to try this a little bit.

Is there anything else you want to say to those people out there who haven’t included poetry or expressive writing in their work yet or in their facilitation practice? What do you want to say to them?

Marisa 43:47
I would say start slow because especially if you’re not 100% with it, just start slow, but something very simple like a prompt. We use prompts all the time, like three things that you will be doing when you leave this workshop that you can apply immediately. That’s a prompt.

So just start slow. And I would really encourage facilitators—because teachers have to write a teaching philosophy statement, but facilitators, nobody asks us for our teaching philosophy statement, then we have one, whether we know it or not. We have beliefs about what it should look like when we facilitate, what the results should be, that kind of thing. I would really encourage facilitators to, happy to give you the link to the, I found that Iowa University helpful. It’s got prompt questions about what you should put in to write it, and then to pull out the heart, the highlight with a yellow highlighter, highlight the lines that are meaningful to you, pull them out, put them on another page, and see what happens.

Beth 45:12
That’s so neat. I hope people do that. And I might dig out the old teaching philosophy statement that I wrote many, many years ago [Marisa laughs] when I was doing my master’s, I think I had to do it then too. And just see what happens.

It’s an easy place to start, right? And starts with ourselves and what we’re trying to do here. Yeah, in our work.

Marisa 45:30
Yes, absolutely.

Beth 45:31
Thank you so much. It’s been lovely to reconnect. I mean, we’ve been connected for years and years and if people don’t know Marisa was one of the people I interviewed to inform my book. And I had the pleasure of having that conversation with her six years ago now. And I just so appreciate hearing what you’re up to now and having you teach me something that I don’t really dig into very much. And it’s been so wonderful. Thank you.

Marisa 45:58
Yeah, thank you, Beth. And thanks for your great work.

I was just listening to your outcomes podcast again. I was like thinking because I’d heard it before. And then I was just listening to it again. And thinking, Oh, my gosh, I mean, just the way you put it in very clear terms about, you know, what matters and why it matters and the order and, you know, these couple of options, I just thought, where were you 20 years ago, [Beth laughs] when I had to figure it out by myself? Yeah.

Beth 46:33
Yeah, I was the same. I mean, we’re talking about master’s in education, educational study. I actually was in the educational studies department as well when I did my master’s in adult education. And no one ever taught me how to write a learning outcome, right? So that’s a whole other conversation, isn’t it?

Beth 46:48
But we persevere in some of this stuff and a lot of it on our own and with the help of colleagues always. So thanks again. Lovely conversation.

Marisa 46:59
Yeah, thanks, Beth.

[Show outro]
Beth 47:01
It was such a pleasure to check in again with Marisa and see how she’s doing and learn from her around these things to do with poetry and expressive writing. It’s been wonderful to dip my toe into this area that I don’t normally dip into very often. I have been touched by poetry here and there in my career. And one of the biggest examples I had was when I took the Instructional Skills Workshop training and this master facilitator.—some of you will know him, Doug Kerr—he facilitated the four day workshop so that we could learn how to teach the Instructional Skills Workshop.

Beth 47:41
And Doug used poetry, I think every day of the four day workshop that he facilitated. And I remember just being touched by it. It made the workshop more special. It made it more memorable for me to be a part of it. And I asked him where the poetry came from that he used in the session. And he told me it was this little book called Teaching with Fire, Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach by Sam Intrator and Megan Scribner. I’ll put that in the show notes for you.

Beth 48:13
So I thought it might be fun to just read one poem that’s in Teaching with Fire for you. Maybe this was one of the poems that Doug read for us, I’m not sure. But it’s one that has spoken to me. And maybe it will leave you thinking about what you might do next after this, thinking about poetry or your facilitation practice in general. Here it is. It’s called The Journey by Mary Oliver.

Beth 48:40
“One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations—
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.”

Beth 49:52
I hope you enjoyed that little bit of poetry to end our episode thinking about poetry. Thanks again to Marisa Gelfusa for being with me and teaching me so much today.

Beth 50:05
On the next episode of the podcast, I have a conversation with Guillaume Vermette. Guillaume is a humanitarian clown and a therapeutic clown. And our conversation dives into what he does in those roles that is intentional, that is full of the skills that we use in facilitation.

Beth 50:26
I know we’re not clowns, but we can learn a lot from therapeutic clowns. Catch me next time with Guillaume Vermette on the show. I’ll see you then.

[Show outro]
Beth 50:37
Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too. To find the show notes, give me feedback or submit ideas for future episodes. Visit FacilitatingOnPurpose.com Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy Facilitating!

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