Teaching and Facilitating

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I enjoy leading workshops and ongoing groups to encourage creativity, authentic voice, and reflecting on life stories. Contact me if you are interested in a workshop for your church or other organization. 

Past workshops include:
  • Unjournaling, a three-session workshop focused on reviewing your journals as a way of reflecting on your life.
  • Nurturing Your Creative Spirit, a six-session series to help rediscover, welcome and nurture creativity through spiritual practice and engaging in creative activities. 
  • What's Your Story? a workshop that invites  participants to take a story from their own experience and deepen it into a powerful, potentially healing tale ready to be told orally.
  • Writing as a Spiritual Practice, writing sessions that invite writers to reflect deeply on a single spiritual theme, such as forgiveness or gratitude, then (optionally) share reflections with others.
  • Dream Workshop, an ongoing group to examine and understand the meaning of our dreams.
  • Custom presentations for meetings and retreats on topics such as transformation, spiritual practice, creativity etc.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
-- Simon Weil

Practice listening - to your friends, your children, music in the wind, your dreams, the ancient wisdom of sacred texts. Listen as though your life depended on it. It does.

Phil Cousineau

Writing

I've been a writer since I could hold a pencil. I have written and published stories, poems, novels, articles, and many, many, many technical and corporate documents, created in more than 25 years as a technical writer.

I was a founding co-director of Lit Youngstown, a literary arts nonprofit dedicated to all things writing in Youngstown, Ohio.  In 2016, I coordinated an oral history project that resulted in publication of Phenomenal Women: Twelve Youngstown Stories. Lit Youngstown still takes the book on the road, and audiences are still moved when college students perform the staged reading that relates highlights of the stories.

I served a term as fiction editor of Ragazine, the global online magazine of arts, information and entertainment.
Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing. Ink is the great cure for all human ills.  -- C.S. Lewis

You are the story you tell yourself, so tell yourself a good story. -
- Francois Kiemde
PictureJake Mary 1907


My maternal grandfather, Lt. Col. Jacob Mary (1884-1970) kept a diary in the early 20th century. When I inherited these diaries, I created a book from them, adding family photos, historical notes, and observations from his daughters and grandchildren. Jacob was a gentle, honest family-oriented man. The project was a labor of love and a pleasure to complete. You can order a copy from Lulu.com here.


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My first one-act play By the Book was produced in the Youngstown Playhouse's Voices of the Valley competition in 2014. The story was inspired partly by my tech writing gigs for cable and telecom companies, and partly by the endlessly fascinating people and landscape of Youngstown. What a treat to see my characters come to life on stage.

My second one-act play, Easter Babka, placed in the finals at Pittsburgh New Works Festival, and was featured in their staged reading series in Spring 2017. The play involves two people who are unwittingly set-up by matchmaking nuns.

My poetry is included in the Fallen City Writers' Anthology (2014). Fallen City is a writer's workshop that has been meeting regularly in Youngstown for more than 30 years. The Anthology is available through lulu.com. My most recent published short stories were chosen for three separate anthologies published by Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.

Four young-adult novels co-authored with Anne Wolfe are officially out of print; some of them are also officially out of date (Web of Death, for instance, which featured a then-cutting-edge plot revolving around mysterious emails!)  I am currently at work on revisions to my novel The Brass Ring, set in Staten Island in late 1980s. My heroine falls in love with a restored carousel and in the process a long-buried family secret.
Ruthie Rosauer and I co-authored a book about the spiritual practice of Singing Meditation, an interfaith spiritual practice that combines singing – of many types – with group observation of silence. (Published by Skinner House Books).

Ruthie still leads the practice, and also leads Side by Side Singing,  using music and singing to encourage healthy aging in people with mild to moderate cognitive impairment such as dementia, Alzheimer’s, brain injuries and/or Parkinson’s Disease.