Creative Awareness Workshops for Children
A Personal Statement
Carol Stroll

In Creative Awareness Workshops children experience poetry as a safe way to express their feelings, thoughts and ideas. I watch them become comfortable with poetry and each other.

Mark, an 8 year old, wrote that I had taught him the soul of poetry. Knowing that only he could find that in himself, I thought about how he had done that. I saw that it was the environment of safety and approval in the workshops that had given Mark a safe place to allow his poetic voice to emerge.

Poetry can be a guide to self-knowledge for any of us. A way to go deep  and hear the voice inside. Poetry: writing it, reading it and listening to it can wake up that voice. Poetry can give our children a way to express themselves from the place that makes each of us unique. Through poetry, children can be heard and known and can hear and know others.

In Creative Awareness Workshops there is no poor or good poetry. The children write to find out what they feel and think and then, if they want, to share it with the group. The writing is not discussed or critiqued. In the workshops seeds are planted. They can sprout at any time.

We all know that life is not always going to be what we wish for our children. There are things they are going to have to figure out for themselves. They are going to need all the tools they can gather. The creative voice, reached through poetry, can be an exceptional tool. In that way, poetry has served me since I was a child.

Over and over, in both adults and children, I have seen poetry be the catalyst that leads to self-expression. Children in Creative Awareness workshops, in that environment of approval  and non-judgment, learn to look inside themselves for their own questions and reach for their answers.