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Wild Reading: How Fiction Sets Imagination Free
30 March 2023 @ 6:30 pm - 20 April 2023 @ 8:30 pm
£50 – £70A 2-evening workshop exploring new developments in fiction therapy.
Hosted by: Author of Waking Dreams Allan Frater
Part 1: Thursday 30th March, 6.30 – 8.30pm
Part 2: Thursday 20th April, 6.30 – 8.30pm
Online via Zoom
Why this workshop?
By what mysterious process does a book come to life in the hands of a reader? Why is life often easier with a good book on the go? And what can be done to enhance this therapeutic cross-over into everyday living? This two-part workshop addresses these questions by exploring reading 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.
Learning outcomes:
The workshop will support you to:
- Understand how reading fiction is an act of imagination.
- Enhance reading skills for imaginative absorption in a story (and get over a ‘reading slump’).
- Distinguish ‘wild reading’ from ‘tame reading’ (a critical, rationalistic focus).
- Explore imagination as an everyday act of perception (not just ‘pictures inside the mind’).
- Apply an imagination-centred fiction therapy method.
- Discuss reading experience (as opposed to talking about books and authors).
- Appreciate and enhance the relationship between imagination and psychological health.
Who will benefit?
The course is for anyone interested in the enhancement of reading fiction, whether personally and/or via fiction therapy with others. It is therefore intended for therapists and non-therapists.
No expert understanding is required.
What to expect:
The first part of the workshop will provide the theoretical context and practical skills needed to get you wild reading.
The second part is scheduled to allow time for reading so that we can then come together to discuss further questions and experiences of wild reading.
The online format on Zoom will be a mixture of slideshow presentation, group discussion and short exercises. The slideshow will be e-mailed to participants after each part of the workshop.
As an online event, a member of the team will send a Zoom link to all registrants closer to the workshop date. Once received, please log in at the start time.
**Please note some of our online events are not recorded due to audience participation**
The approach:
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 focussing directly upon the process of reading itself. 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.
Workshop sources:
The workshop applies active-imagination and art-therapy methods to the reading of fiction. In particular, the critical developments of these approaches as presented in Waking Dreams by Allan Frater, the course trainer.
Additional sources include: Keith Oatley, Sven Birkerts, Matthew Rubery, Wolfgang Iser and Walter J. Slatoff.
Ticket price:
At the Trust we appreciate that each person has their own unique situation – including financial. We invite you to select the price point that feels like it represents a fair contribution for attending this event.
The options are: £50, £60, £70
If you are a current Psychosynthesis Trust student and finances are a barrier to attending this workshop, please contact Kajal at events@ptrust.org.uk
You can also discover more about Wild Reading in Allan’s latest blog. Click here to read it.
Trainer:
Allan Frater is a psychotherapist, supervisor and author of Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. Since 2011 he has taught at the Psychosynthesis Trust on the Counselling Diploma courses as well as CPD events related to his research interest in the role of imagination within normal everyday life, creative work and healing/transformation. Partly as an excuse to read more novels, he is currently writing a second book on how reading fiction enhances imaginative life, upon which this course is based.
Allan also runs a regular online ‘Waking Dreams’ short course, click here to find out more.
Qualifications:-Diploma in Supervision with Soul (2013)-MA Psychosynthesis Psychotherapy (2011)-PGDip Psychosynthesis Counselling (2007)-MBACP(Accred)-UKCP(reg)
Find out more: wildimagination.uk | @wakingdreams20
**Please note: Unfortunately, our insurance does not cover participants residing in Canada and the US. This means applications from these countries take part at their own risk. If you have any questions, please contact events@ptrust.org.uk**
