by Margaret Galvin
Margaret Galvin is a creative writing facilitator and published poet with an academic background in social care. She has always had an interest in how creative writing can be used to help bereaved people grow in self-understanding and wellbeing. Margaret believes that writing is a powerful medium to celebrate and honour the memory of the people, places and events that shape us and that it can be an effective way to resolve issues, re-visit the past and, in time, integrate the loss.
In her previous workshops, Margaret created a space to help therapists and volunteers working in bereavement support in Wexford. The workshops aimed to locate the value of creative writing for clients within a theory based framework. Relevant texts, poems and prose were made available to participants to discuss as template texts in order to explore their own memory work. Specific texts were chosen for their emotional and sensory recall and all materials were made accessible, varied in its remit and range. Participants were invited to engage in the creative writing exercises in order to explore their own grief and loss issues and to better understand the role that writing can play in their work with clients.
