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SUMMARY:Mind Matters: Crafting Stories of Mental Health in Fiction and Nonfiction
DESCRIPTION:This weekend we delve into the art of writing about mental health with compassion and authenticity. As writers—whether of memoirs\, fiction\, or clinical works—we must navigate the delicate balance of portraying the complexities of mental health conditions while avoiding stereotypes. Characters—whether we are writing about ourselves\, patients\, or fictional creations—should possess unique personalities\, strengths\, weaknesses\, desires\, and motivations that extend beyond their diagnoses. How can we ensure our writing feels vibrant and authentic rather than resembling a dry checklist from the DSM? How does our writing show respect for the dignity of these characters? This weekend\, we will explore diverse voices and experiences to enhance our understanding of writing about mental illness. \n  \nCoordinators: Kerry Malawista\, Ph.D. \n  \nGUEST FACULTY: \nJohn Donatich served as the Director of Yale University Press from 2003 to 2025. He was VP\, Publisher of Basic Books from 1997-2003. His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly\, Harper’s\, The Village Voice and elsewhere. He has published a memoir\, Ambivalence\, A Love Story and a novel\, The Variations. He is currently a psychoanalyst in training at NIP. Donatich is a board member and fellow of the NY Institute of the Humanities and the London Institute for the Humanities.  He was recently awarded a fellowship by the Corporation of Yaddo and a residency at Civitella Ranieri.  He lives in New Haven\, CT and New York\, NY.  He is married to writer\, agent\, editor Betsy Lerner and father to Raffaella Donatich. \nBetsy Lerner is the author of the advice book to writers\, The Forest for the Trees\, and the memoirs Food and Loathing and The Bridge Ladies. She is also the co-writer with Temple Grandin of the NYT Bestseller\, Thinking in Pictures. Lerner received an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry. A publishing professional for more than thirty years\, Lerner is a literary agent in New York. Her first novel\, Shred Sisters\, was longlisted for a Debut Novel Award from The Center for Fiction and was selected as one of best 100 books by the New York Times. \nJonathan Rosen is the author of two novels and three works of non-fiction\, most recently The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship\, Madness\, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions\, which was named a top ten book of the year by The New York Times\, The Wall Street Journal\, Slate and People Magazine. It was also chosen by Barack Obama as one of his Favorite Books of 2023\, and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in memoir. His essays have appeared in The New York Times\, The New Yorker\, The Atlantic\, and The Free Press\, an internet-based media company where he is Consulting Editor. \nAria Beth Sloss is the author of Autobiography of Us\, a novel.  Her short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train\, Harvard Review\, Ploughshares\, Joyland\, One Story\, Kenyon Review\, and Best American Short Stories 2015.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop\, she is the recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Arts Foundation\, Yaddo\, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is currently writing a novel about a modern King Lear\, Alzheimers and the line between reality and story. She lives in New York City with her family.
URL:https://newdirectionsinwriting.com/event/mind-matters/
LOCATION:VA
CATEGORIES:Weekend Conference
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20261106T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20261108T000000
DTSTAMP:20260421T021949
CREATED:20251109T174159Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260131T023813Z
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SUMMARY:Caged Bodies\, Freed Minds
DESCRIPTION:Under what conditions are we free to think? To open ourselves to relating across boundaries of class\, color\, and experience? To fully give of ourselves to others? And to fully realize our own potential? This weekend will focus on these and other core questions of being. \nThe system of incarceration in the United States\, as with most carceral systems around the world\, is designed both to create and to isolate a criminal class into whom disavowed aspects of the free population can be projected. Surrounded by high walls that are both physical and psychological\, places of incarceration are largely hidden from view and constitute a closed society that for most of us—at least those of us who are white and privileged—is fantacized\, demonized\, even romanticized—but never experienced. It is a racialized world flattened into stereotyped darkness so that the world outside can feel brighter. \nThe truth is of course far more complex. People who have lived within this system—know things about living that the rest of us do not. For some\, the caged world of incarceration further deadens the mind and spirit that for many have been under attack by our society since early childhood. For others\, the pressures of this life open unexpected\, sometimes breathtaking vistas into human experience that transform their view of the world and their sense of purpose within it. \nWhat can we can learn from each other when the walls of incarceration come down? How may have members of our society who have experienced incarceration opened their minds and spirits\, even while under the severe constraints of confinement? And how may have other members of our society\, who have not experienced incarceration\, nonetheless subjected themselves to severe constraints on thinking and being even under the privileges of freedom? \nThis weekend will be an opportunity to explore these and other paradoxical relationships between freedom and constraint in the body\, mind\, and spirit.
URL:https://newdirectionsinwriting.com/event/caged-bodies-freed-minds/
LOCATION:VA
CATEGORIES:Weekend Conference
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20270205T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20270207T000000
DTSTAMP:20260421T021949
CREATED:20251109T174529Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260302T183536Z
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SUMMARY:What Moves Between Us: Embodiment and Relating Beyond Representational Speech
DESCRIPTION:The New Directions weekend will explore forms of human relating that are not reducible to speech\, that exceed and sometimes undo what can be said. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory\, the arts\, and embodied practice\, we will consider how people affect and transform one another through affective qualities such as tone\, rhythm\, timing\, movement\, and intensity— dimensions of communication that operate implicitly\, at the level of the procedural unconscious and often without recourse to explicit meaning. Rather than treating language as the privileged site of relational truth\, we will consider speech as just one aspect of a broader field of embodied relational exchange. \nPsychoanalyst Henry Markman will describe analytic relating as unfolding in time and without prescribed outcome\, creating a shared emotional field that is shaped as much by rhythm\, pacing\, and responsiveness as by words. From this perspective\, the analytic situation becomes a lived\, temporal encounter—an I am with you enacted through cadence\, pause\, and responsiveness rather than interpretation alone. Henry’s work invites participants to consider how such nonrepresentational dimensions of experience shape clinical work\, writing\, and scholarly inquiry\, and how newness and potentiality emerge within relational time. \nThe weekend will include two experiential sessions with musician\, actress\, and educator Abena Koomson-Davis and educator and improv actor Sam Tanner. Abena will help us explore the embodied qualities of lullaby—voice\, rhythm\, repetition\, and breath—as forms of connection that often precede words. Her work will help us experience lullabies as forms of attunement\, regulation\, cultural memory\, and parental address. Sam will lead structured improvisational exercises that highlight responsiveness\, timing\, and the risks of meeting one another without a script\, and he will reflect on how improvisation informs his work as a writer. Both sessions will include audience involvement (in addition to Q&A time) that will serve as invitations to experience directly how tone\, pacing\, sound\, and movement shape relational space. Together\, Abena and Sam offer a way to explore dimensions of encounter that clinicians and writers regularly rely on in their work but may not often have the opportunity to examine explicitly. \nWeekend organizer Gail Boldt will present a paper exploring how her work with children ranging from 3- to 9-years old undid her confidence in the power of speech and representation as primary actors in learning and change. Drawing from case materials\, she will explore the action of non-representational sound and play with materials as processes that shape relational experience and open possibilities for change without relying on interpretation or verbal insight. \n  \nWeekend Coordinator – Gail Boldt \n  \nSpeakers:  \nHenry Markman\, MD is a Supervising and Training Analyst\, Faculty Member\, and Co-chair of Dialogues in Contemporary Psychoanalysis at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and Faculty\, The Wilhelm Reich Center for the Study of Embodiment.  His recent book (2022) is Creative Engagement in Psychoanalytic Practice published by Routledge. Among topics in his published work are play in adolescent analysis\, embodied attunement\, aesthetic experience\, musical accompaniment in psychoanalysis\, Bion’s late work\, the analyst’s ethical commitments\, and the relevance of Ferenczi’s mutual analysis. His most recent paper\, in press\, is The Analyst’s Embodied Presence: Working Within an Aesthetic Matrix.  He is in private practice in Berkeley\, California\, where he also consults and leads study groups. \n  \nAbena Koomson-Davis is a performer\, educator\, and wordsmith. She originated the role of Fela’s mother in the Off-Broadway run of FELA! The musical and reprised her role many times in the TONY Award-winning Broadway production. She has performed with Natalie Merchant\, Angelique Kidjo\, and many other luminaries. Abena is the founding musical director for the Resistance Revival Chorus and currently serves as Ethics Chair in the Middle Division of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.  \n  \nSamuel Jaye Tanner\, Ph.D.\, is a Professor of English Education at the University of Iowa. His books Whiteness\, Pedagogy\, Youth and America: Critical Whiteness Studies in the Classroom and Storytelling and Improvisation as Anti-Racist Pedagogy have won scholarly awards. Sam has also written works in science fiction\, memoir\, humor\, and theology. Sam has been teaching\, directing\, and performing improv theater for 25 years. He is a co-founding member of Happy Valley Improv. Sam taught high school English and Drama before becoming a professor. He is also a creative writer and an improviser. \n  \nGail Boldt is a Distinguished Professor of Education at Penn State University and a psychotherapist who has had a clinical practice focused on young children. She is currently completing a book entitled Vital Literacies: Relational Dynamics of Learning and Change (Routledge\, 2027) that explores how working with young children dramatically challenged her faith in the role of language and the representation of ideas in learning and change\, leading her to attend to how sound and materiality\, often operating outside conscious intention\, are central to relationships\, to what is learned\, and to how it is learned. Gail is the Senior Editor of the Bank Street Occasional Papers. 
URL:https://newdirectionsinwriting.com/event/what-moves-between-us/
LOCATION:VA
CATEGORIES:Weekend Conference
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20270430T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20270502T000000
DTSTAMP:20260421T021949
CREATED:20251109T175107Z
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SUMMARY:Spring 2027 Conference: TBA
DESCRIPTION:TBA
URL:https://newdirectionsinwriting.com/event/spring2027-conference/
LOCATION:VA
CATEGORIES:Weekend Conference
END:VEVENT
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20271105T080000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20271107T170000
DTSTAMP:20260421T021949
CREATED:20250729T194317Z
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SUMMARY:Uncommon Bedfellows: Psychoanalysis\, the Climate Crisis\, and Environmental Bonds
DESCRIPTION:Imagine for a moment a place that you frequented\, or that had special meaning to you as a child – it might be a beach on Cape Cod\, or a special nook behind a garden shed\, or an apple tree that you plucked from on your walk to school. Now imagine that particular object or place being gone forever\, washed away by floods\, or too polluted to swim in or cut down for a road to be constructed. While those events may seem minor\, if they occur\, we grieve something of ourselves in that loss\, in both memory and in meaning. These places are more than just physical locations: they are repositories of childhood memories and experiences\, making their loss deeply personal. \nWe are living in a time known as the Anthropocene\, a geological age in which humans have become the single most influential species on the planet\, causing significant global warming and other changes to land\, environment\, water\, organisms and the atmosphere\, resulting in the extinction of countless species and massive climate events\, contributing to the losses mentioned above. Wildfires\, massive flooding\, and extreme heat have become commonplace occurrences that all of us have either experienced ourselves or know someone who has. We are at a planetary tipping point\, where every action we take\, every law passed or struck down\, every defense we engage in or work through\, has significant ramifications for generations to come. We have strayed from our connection\, and our place\, on the earth. \nPsychoanalysis has a significant place in this context\, beginning with the work of Harold Searles (1972). Sally Weintrobe (2021)\, a British psychoanalyst\, believes that the spirit of psychoanalysis can offer us an understanding of as well as a direction out of our current situation. In her seminal text\, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare\, she posits that such defenses as projection\, denial\, disavowal\, and a feeling of omnipotence all play a role in the unfolding of the climate crisis as we experience it today. And because of this\, the moral injury\, or sense of injustice\, about what is happening to the planet affects not only us\, but also our patients as we experience this world together. How do we hold our own feelings\, as well as theirs? How might we imagine a culture of caring as it applies to our planet? How can we foster improved mental health by turning to nature (Adams & Morgan\, 2018)? And because we are writers as well as psychotherapists\, how might we “write wild” (e.g.\, turning to the natural world for creative inspiration) in order to form a “creative partnership with nature” (Welling\, 2014)? \nThis weekend we will examine the intersection between psychoanalysis and the climate crisis\, as well as how this dialogue can enrich our understanding of ourselves\, our patients\, and the non-human world. To advance this objective\, we will consider what it means to “write wild”\, and by doing so explore our attachment to the natural world\, as well as explore what it means to foster a culture of care. This will be an offering of hope and resilience! \n  \nCoordinators: Donna H. DiCello\, Psy.D.  \n  \nGUEST FACULTY: \nElizabeth Allured\, Psy.D. is a psychologist/psychoanalyst who co-founded the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America in 2017.   This nonprofit organization’s mission is to educate mental health clinicians\, and the lay public\, about the mental health impacts of the climate crisis and related social injustices.  She served as its co-president\, and currently chairs the Professional Development Committee.  She teaches in CPA-NA’s  Climate Aware Therapist course\, as well as its Climate Café Facilitation Training program.  She began presenting professional papers on mental health and the environmental crisis in 2007\, and since then has presented papers on this topic at national\, international\, and local conferences.  Her writing on the topic appears in Contemporary Psychoanalysis\, Psychoanalytic Dialogues\, and as chapters in psychoanalytic books by Routledge Press.  She has been interviewed by media sources including the San Francisco Chronicle\, Parenting Magazine\, and The Psychotherapy Networker.  She has given workshops for climate activists\, and for undergraduate and graduate students at various academic institutions such as Bard College\, Yale University\, and the Harvard Undergraduate UNICEF program.  She is currently completing a book for Guilford Publishing\, entitled Climate Aware Therapy for Every Clinician.  She is in private practice on Long Island\, New York. \n  \nSusan Bodnar\, Ph.D.\, is on the faculty of Teachers College\, Columbia University\, and is\, among other things\, a walk therapy practitioner in her private practice in NYC. She is also the part-time clinical director of The Wellness Center\, a start-up mental health clinic in upstate New York. She is an associate editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues and on the editorial board of Ecopsychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She loves to write and recently published an edited volume\, Unmoored Yet Unbroken: Ecopsychology for a Changing World – Stories of Human Nature Relationships (Wiley). Importantly\, she is a great friend of all living things – plants\, animals\, most people and especially her family. \n  \nNickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts\, studied literature at Oxford University\, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister\, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book\, Fanny Says (BOA Editions)\, won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently\, she lives in Asheville\, NC\, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016\, she’s been writing about these animals\, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. To Those Who Were Our First Gods\, a chapbook of these first nine poems\, won the 2018 Rattle Prize\, and her essay-in-poems\, The Donkey Elegies\, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. Her poem “Parable” won the 2024 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize and was published as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day initiative. Every summer\, she teaches as part of the low-residency MFA Program at the Sewanee School of Letters in Tennessee. She’s a proud Fellow of the Black Earth Institute and is President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets\, a nonprofit organization that aims to nurture a community hellbent on finding the words that protect and repair our climate-changed world. \n  \nKari Weil\, Ph.D. is University Professor of Letters\, College of the Environment and Feminist\, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Comparative Literature and is the author of three books\, Precarious Partners: Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Chicago Press\, 2020)\, Thinking Animals:  Why Animal Studies Now (Columbia UP\, 2012)\, Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (University Press of Virginia\, 1992) and numerous essays related\, most recently\, to the fields of animal studies (within the arts and humanities) and to issues of feminist theory and gender studies. Her current research explores the literary legacies of what was known as animal magnetism in theories of affective influence\, tactility\, and traumatic healing.
URL:https://newdirectionsinwriting.com/event/uncommon-bedfellows-psychoanalysis-the-climate-crisis-and-environmental-bonds/
LOCATION:VA
CATEGORIES:Weekend Conference
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