Writing can play a powerful role in finding one’s authentic purpose in life—one’s wholeness. Writer, teacher, speaker, and activist Parker Palmer says in his book A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life that life’s external forces and expectations as well as our internal fears and brokenness tend to divide us from that wholeness, which various cultural and spiritual traditions have called true self, original nature, inner teacher, identity, integrity, and soul. Palmer cofounded the Center for Courage and Renewal and originated the Circle of Trust®, whose principles and practices create trustworthy space for the individual soul to show up. (More information on the Courage and Renewal® approach and Circles of Trust can be found at couragerenewal.org/courage-renewal-approach/.) Using the Circle of Trust approach, this workshop will place writing front and center as a potent pathway for exploration, discovery, reflection, discernment, sharing, and action in one’s journey toward wholeness. Exploring the self lends itself especially to the personal essay and memoir, though writing in other genres and combinations of genres is certainly invited. Discovering wholeness is a lifelong process, so writers of any age and at any stage of their writing experience are welcome.

Thomas Dean is a Circle of Trust® facilitator-in-preparation with the Center for Courage and Renewal and is senior presidential writer/editor at the University of Iowa, where he also teaches interdisciplinary and writing courses. He also has taught in numerous community programs and facilitated workshops and retreats. Thomas’s books include Under a Midland Sky and Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit (co-authored with Cindy Crosby), both from Ice Cube Press, and he has published numerous essays in national and regional academic and general audience publications. He also edited The Grace of Grass and Water, a collection of essays on the late Minnesota author Paul Gruchow (Ice Cube Press).