Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu 14 Sep 2023
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Traditional fiction therapy (or bibliotherapy) favours prescribing texts to match presenting issues and discussing the thinking/feeling after-effects of reading. This workshop differs from these approaches by focusing directly upon the process of reading itself, exploring why life is somehow just better or easier when reading fiction, and how to enhance this therapeutic crossover into everyday living.
The wild spontaneity and freedom of fictive experience is found, not in the pages of a book or a reader’s mind separate from the text, but in the coming-together of a text with a responsive reader. The workshop therefore adopts a position from directly inside the living relationship between text and reader, offering a new approach to fiction therapy as an act of imagination.
‘Wild Reading’ is a way to name, validate and enhance the imaginative wonder of fictive experience. To be wild is to be free-willed and reading wildly allows readers to imaginatively break free in two related areas:
- absorption within a text as an imagining beyond limiting situations and restricted identities.
- how fiction continues beyond the page as a revitalised reading of the ‘text’ of everyday life.
The result will be an experiential and theoretical appreciation of reading fiction, not as an isolated fantasy activity but as the cultivation of an imaginal perception that takes us to the heart of human creativity, healing and transformation.
This workshop, by author Allan Frater, is based upon his current work-in-process, which focusses upon reading fiction as an enhancement of imaginative life, with the provisional title: ‘Wild Reading: How Fiction Sets Imagination Free’
Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event
- Understand how reading fiction is an act of imagination which enhances psychological health.
- How to apply an imagination-centred fiction therapy method and discuss reading experience (as opposed to talking about books and authors)
- How to explore the connections between ‘on-the-page’ reading and ‘beyond-the-page’ reading the ‘text’ of everyday life.
Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?
- The course is for anyone interested in the enhancement of reading fiction, whether personally and/or via fiction therapy with others.
How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?
- Revitalise engagement with fiction on-the-page and how it spills over into the enhancement of everyday life.