International Scholarship

The NAPT Federation has for some years supported international scholarships to the annual conference. Conferences are a great way of getting to know an organisation – meeting many dozens of its members in one go, getting a feel for the culture. When I met John Fox in London at a workshop in the autumn of 2000, I wanted to find out more about Poetry Therapy, with its capital PS. He suggested attending the conference in Washington in April 2001. With the help of a grant from Arts Council England, I did so and that opened many doors and certainly changed my professional life. At lunch, I met Geri Chavis who later became my mentor supervisor. I attended peer learning sessions with Peggy Heller and enjoyed the first of five conferences in a row as I worked towards my Certified Poetry Therapist credential. An International Scholarship enabled me to attend the California conference in 2004. This has led to a regular to-ing and fro-ing with Geri, Mari Alschuler, Ted Bowman and others teaching and leading workshops for me ad my colleagues in Cornwall.

I have e-interviewed some other recipients of the International Scholarship. There’s a certain amount of serendipity in their initial contact with NAPT – although all were already interested in the field, even if they didn’t know of its formal existence in the US. Niall Hickey from Ireland saw a short article about ten years ago in The Irish Times. He says, ‘I still have the cutting, in which that year's upcoming NAPT conference is mentioned’ – as an example of ‘practical art’ in contrast to the high art of Harold Bloom's book on the Great Literary Canon. Niall then researched further on the web. Jurate Sucylaite of Lithuania received an award to attend the Iowa Writing Program in 1998 and whilst there was given a cheque for $25 by Prairie Lights to buy a book. She says ‘I spent about 3 hours in the bookshop and found ‘Poetic Medicine’, by John Fox ... and wrote him a letter.’ Another international delegate also came via a John Fox workshop in Stroud, England – already interested in poetry therapy, ‘what I saw at those sessions excited me even more. So the conference seemed an ideal opportunity, I wanted to see more people talking about this, to get a rounder idea of what it was all about ... to see if I could do that too.’ It seems that John Fox with his tireless travelling, is an unofficial ambassador for NAPT. And more generally, in spite of email and telephones, it is face-to-face meetings that make the world go round.

It takes a certain amount of courage to jump on a plane to a strange city for a first NAPT conference so perhaps it is no coincidence that many of the International Scholars are pioneers – Niall has founded the Irish Poetry Therapy Network and his passion for exploring clinical-developmental therapeutic use of poetry is now a permanent factor in his life. He works as a psychotherapist in private practice and includes poetry therapy with virtually every client. Jurate, a psychiatrist, describes herself as a pioneer of poetry therapy in her country and practices in Klaipeda Psychiatric hospital. I have also pioneered poetry therapy in the NHS (our state-funded national health service) and through chairing Lapidus – the UK’s parallel organisation have been able to spread the word

As well as the thrill of finding kindred spirits and the highly motivating experiences of the conference, there are also challenges. Niall comments how it ‘brings me into a culture quite different from my own’, another British attendee felt very emotionally vulnerable and I too was astonished at my first conference how freely people seemed to disclose. Perhaps a case of British reserve! Experiencing the US ‘from the inside’ has also been immensely enriching for me although attempting to go for a walk from the hotels in Denver and Costa Mesa was perhaps a bit of a mistake!

It’s not too fanciful to see these international scholarships as a small step to building peace in the world. At first, the differences - in culture, attitude, delivery and so on are magnified but later, the similarities are much more apparent as we begin to find ourselves in the constantly opening possibilities of poetry – as Jurate beautifully puts it, it was at the conference ‘where I experienced everyone in myself, and I saw my image in others.