Over the weekend of July 25–26, the iaPoetry community gathered online for Action Weekend 2026, this year themed “Flowing into the Future.” Across two afternoons, poetry therapy practitioners, facilitators, and curious newcomers came together to write, listen, and think out loud about where this field is headed and how poetry itself can help us move through change rather than resist it.
If you were there, consider this a warm recap. If you weren’t, consider it an invitation: this conversation is ongoing, and there’s room in it for you.
Day One: What does Flow mean to us?
María opened the first panel, featuring Giulia Tosolini, Victoria Field and Viviana Russo, with the wider room drawn in throughout rather than held for a closing Q&A, with a deceptively simple question put directly to the day’s presenters: what does flow mean in your practice?
For Giulia, flow is essentially rhythm, the shared pulse poetry sets moving between facilitator and group. For Viviana, a former dancer and actress, it’s movement itself: she found her way to poetry therapy partly because it let her keep dancing, just with words instead of a body. Others in the room described flow as something fully private, total immersion, where even the sense of being watched by your own inner critic disappears. Sana connected it to the Japanese idea of ikigai: the sweet spot where what you love, what you’re good at, and what’s needed all meet, leaving nothing left to push against. Nancy Scherlong called it a kind of timelessness, being “so in the doing” that hours vanish. Others described it as trust, water finding its way around a stone in a stream, or as surrender: letting a moment carry you without needing to steer it.
When Resistance shows up
The conversation naturally turned toward resistance in the group. Nancy framed it as a question of readiness and risk, cautioning against assuming we know when someone else is “ready.” Sana described how resistance in a group can become almost contagious, rising and falling with a shared energy that facilitators learn to read the way a musician reads a room. Victoria shared two vivid examples from her own practice: a participant who once put a paper bag over her head rather than respond, and a technique of inviting people to speak about difficult material in the third person when part of them feels too exposed to say “I.”
One of the panel’s quietest, most powerful reframes came from Geraldine Campbell, who suggested resistance isn’t really the opposite of flow, but a doorway to it. Get curious about what resistance is protecting, rather than fighting it, and it tends to soften enough for the current to move again. Victoria picked up a similar thread, invoking the spirit of Rumi’s “Guest House” to encourage facilitators to welcome whatever shows up in a room rather than smoothing every voice into agreement, especially now, when people are so used to treading on eggshells that real difference rarely gets any air. Nancy connected this back to narrative therapy: what looks like “resistance” in a group is sometimes a marginalized story pushing back against whichever narrative is taking up the most space.
A few panelists also named a quieter, more private form of resistance, the pull to over-explain a poem intellectually rather than trust what it stirred up, or a reluctance to share that has nothing to do with the writing itself and everything to do with how exposing it feels to speak it aloud. Reflecting on her own facilitation, Venus Lukic described how much of her role is simply holding space without judgment, offering permission not to share, and trusting that the process is the therapy, whether or not a word of it is ever spoken out loud.
Holding structure while letting practice change
The discussion then rose to the level of the field itself: as poetry therapy adapts to new generations, online formats, and different settings, where should practice hold firm, and where should it flow with the changes?
Sana described trusting an evolving relationship between the poem, the facilitator, and the group, “lines in the sand,” not lines in stone, including a genuinely intuitive process of sensing a theme emerge in a session and then trusting that the right poem will find its way to her, sometimes from unexpected places. Nancy pushed back gently on any field-wide “stuckness” around fixed protocol, arguing that method should be shaped by the people and moment in front of you, including, she noted, the ongoing tension in calling this work “poetry” therapy at all, when it draws just as much on story, symbol, myth, and lyric. The conversation also touched on the particular responsibility of practitioners who are licensed clinicians working across borders, where scope of practice is legally tied to a specific license and location, meaning clear, explicit agreements about role have to come before the creative work begins, since it’s unclear roles, not creativity, that put people at risk of harm.
Geraldine offered an image that captured the balance the whole panel kept circling back to: a river needs both flow and banks, without banks, the water loses direction; without flow, it stagnates. Structure that holds the work, and enough openness to let life actually enter it, several agreed that’s not a contradiction, it’s the whole practice.
Closing Round: Finishing a sentence
To close, María invited everyone to finish one sentence together: the future of poetry therapy flows toward… The answers, offered in quick succession, became a kind of collective poem in themselves: toward the expansion of the galaxy; to and from the heart; a rite of passage; spreading poetry, and flowing with whatever comes through it; a re-emergence of self-awareness; intersections; reinhabiting humanity; the ocean of eternity; wherever the future takes us. Perhaps the line that lingered longest: double empathy, full awareness and grace for yourself, held alongside truly hearing and extending grace to someone else.
Day Two: What is Emerging in the field?
The second day turned outward, asking a bigger question: where is poetry therapy actually headed, as a discipline and as a global practice? Facilitated by Sana Mulji, with Nasra Al Adawi as co-host, the panel opened with a question that sits at the heart of the field’s growth: is the evidence base for poetry therapy expanding and if it still lags behind other creative arts therapies, why?
A few threads stood out:
The research is catching up. Geraldine shared findings from Dr. Josie Billington’s work at the University of Liverpool, which uses brain imaging to show that reading literature engages both hemispheres of the brain in ways that echo the mechanisms behind EMDR, a well-established trauma therapy. It’s a striking piece of evidence for something poetry therapists have long known experientially: that reading and writing poetry isn’t just comforting, it’s neurologically active.
New models are emerging from unexpected places. Lila described an approach from an Indian practitioner working with breast cancer patients, who structured therapy around a single person’s life story told in five stages, a simple but powerful frame for helping people locate themselves within a larger arc of meaning. Meanwhile, Nasra shared research from the Gulf region: a completed master’s thesis on using Paul Kalanithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air in bibliotherapy with cancer patients, and a forthcoming study on “writing for wellness” with university students and job seekers, signs of a field taking root in places it hasn’t traditionally had a strong presence.
Working across cultures raises real questions and real rewards. Much of the discussion turned to what it means to facilitate poetry therapy in multicultural spaces: how to select poems responsibly across cultural lines, when and how to translate, and who has the standing to bring a story that isn’t their own into the room. There was no single answer, but a shared instinct: the responsibility lies in staying accountable to the specific group in front of you, not to an abstract idea of “diversity.” Geraldine described translating council-run poetry sessions into multiple languages for a multicultural group in Waterford; Alison shared how her group in France has thrived precisely because participants bring their own traditions into the mix rather than working around a single shared reference point. Across examples, from refugee communities to Indigenous reconciliation work, the same pattern kept surfacing: trust built in the room does more to bridge cultural difference than any curated reading list.
Why this Matters beyond the room
Looking at both days together, a throughline emerges. Day One’s conversation about resistance, the instinct to soften it rather than fight it, to build trust before assuming what someone needs, turned out to be exactly what Day Two’s practitioners described doing at a cultural scale: staying accountable to the specific group in front of you, translating rather than assuming, letting trust do more of the bridging than any curated reading list. And Day One’s insistence on holding both structure and openness, banks and flow, is the same balance the field is striking as it builds a harder evidence base without losing the intuitive, relational core that makes the work what it is.
That’s the conversation Action Weekend opened, and it doesn’t close when the call ends. If any of this resonates, whether you’re a practitioner, a researcher, or simply someone who has felt a poem do something to you that you couldn’t quite explain, there’s a place for you in this community. Reach out to iaPoetry or mine (!) to stay connected to what comes next.
