I’m Tania Rochelle, writer and editor, creative writing teacher, mental health counselor, and creativity coach. I believe in the power of words, both written and spoken, and have witnessed the ways that storytelling can heal the teller and inspire the listener’s own healing and change. I have two books of poetry, Karaoke Funeral and The World’s Last Bone, both published by Snake Nation Press, and have taught writing for about 20 years. The transformative power of writing is what led me to counseling. I’m available to conduct individual or group writing workshops that focus on craft, but I’m even more interested in facilitating workshops that integrate writing and group therapy to process trauma. My Poetry as Survival workshops are based on Gregory Orr’s book of that same title, with the goal being to create poems from our most difficult life experiences in order to reclaim and master that material and successfully process the associated trauma. While journaling and narrative therapy are helpful therapeutic tools, I’ve found that poetry has even greater power to process trauma, because poems require intense attention and order. Poems demand that we enter the material over and over, viewing it from many angles, shaping it and re-envisioning it. You don’t have to be a “poet” to benefit from writing poetry, any more than you have to be a “rock star” to have fun singing in the shower. Poetry’s power to heal its writer lies in the process. However, you might just become a poet in that process.