Expressive Writing

With David McLoghlin

Supporting Organisational Well-being via Creative Writing in Business and Community Settings

David McLoghlin

Writing Courses for Groups

I work with groups in a variety of contexts, designing classes to support team building, and workshops that benefit individual and organisational well being. Whether multi-week courses or one-off sessions, my classes are flexible and can be tailored to your organisational needs. I have taught as part of a pilot scheme to support Cork County Council employees’ wellbeing; during Empathy Week at a secondary school I used creativity to assist secondary school students reflect on compassion and community, and I have designed classes according to the UN’S sustainable development goals. To make these sometimes abstract pillars tangible, I used photographs, and poems, to focus on three aspects: (1) migration, specifically migrants travelling on the “train of death“ through Mexico; (2) racism via the lens of traffic stops in the USA, and (3) war via images from the Irish War of Independence. I am happy to discuss designing a class or series of classes for your team. (Scroll to the bottom for my contact form.)

  • Bond as a team and identify common goals and values, via collective writing, prompts and fun writing games.

  • Memoir explores the themes and threads in our lives’ tapestry. Here we use storytelling to explore and re-evaluate

    • The key moments and themes in our lives

    • collaborating and understanding via sharing and active listening

    • How the past happens for us, not just “to us”.

  • As we observe nature by writing short poems, we bring ourselves and our environment closer together. As they unite in the writing, we move towards that space within ourselves.

  • Free writing and journaling have long been recognised as therapeutic tools in healing from stress and symptoms of burn out. This class assists by helping students find a space to listen to their own voices and return refreshed and sustained from within.

How Expressive Writing Can Benefit Your Employees

Studies consistently show(*) that expressive, or creative, writing has significant health benefits. It can help us to regulate our emotions and our nervous systems, and to regain a sense of clarity, reconnecting us to ourselves and to others. The applications or benefits go beyond the remit of any specific genre.

  • Free writing and journaling help us identify our goals and values, reduce stress, and improve a sense of gratitude.

  • Poetry plays a part in noticing the world around us and our place in it

  • Fiction can help identify the through-lines of the stories we tell ourselves and how they influence our lives.

The benefits are immediately obvious. Whatever helps us as individuals radiates outward into our culture and the wider community. When employees are fully engaged within a workplace culture that nurtures their wellbeing, turnover decreases, institutional knowledge is preserved, and employee ownership grows, enhancing productivity and creating a positive feedback loop.

An inclusive, diverse and positive culture foster environments where we feel engaged and motivated in terms of what we can bring to the table. Staff engagement in a creative writing practice can implicitly support this kind of environment.

The workshops that I offer can play an integral part in that leverage. We know the term hygiene as applied to the body, and are beginning to see it linked to sleep (as in, “learn to practice sleep hygiene to establish quality rest”), but at a basic level, establishing a regular writing practice forms part of a psychological hygiene, and can be an essential self-care tool. Writing reaches inwards and outwards – in terms of paying attention to life around us and to the life within us. Writing knits these together, and this connection brings us alive, revitalising us inwardly, helping us to show up and contribute, and grow in courage, vulnerability, leadership and trust.

* See “Expressive Writing in Psychological Science” by James W. Pennebaker

Testimonials

  • Kathryn Stam, PhD, a Student at the Center for Fiction

    “I have taken many memoir classes, but David’s class was special. David has a gentle and encouraging manner. He read our work carefully and gave us structural and line edits on two chapters, helping me to solve problems that I had been struggling with for weeks. I recommend working with David. I am so grateful to him for helping shepherd my work along with such skill and grace.”

  • Scott M. Morris, Author

    “David is an award-winning poet and writer who also happens to be as sharp an editor as you could hope to find. He truly enjoys helping others see their own work through to completion, helping clients get every word, sentence and comma perfect. Yet he is also a master at figuring out big, structural questions. He is super pleasant to work with, but he is relentless when it comes guiding a project to completion. You couldn't ask for a better companion when trying to get your work to the next level.”

  • Kajal Odedra, Author

    “David is a great teacher, he engaged so deeply with our individual work and helped me to see what was working in my pieces and gave great advice for what to do with it next. His vast knowledge of literature meant that he would regularly reference other works that became points of inspiration and helped me to expand my own thinking.”

  • Richard Prins, Poet, Essayist and Literary Translator

    David edited my travel memoir over the course of about nine months. His edits revealed his broad and deep study of the art of the memoir, and looking back, I can see how prescient David’s comments were. A year later, a literary scout for a major publisher (whom David put me in touch with) identified those same qualities as among the memoir's strongest elements. In short, it was a great pleasure working with David, and extremely helpful.”

  • Joyce Cleere Butler

    “David McLoghlin is a fabulous poet. I was part of an online poetry group with him last year and I know my poems improved 100% because of his feedback.”

  • Julia Gamolina, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Madame Architect

    “I have so much gratitude to David for this class! This was my first time doing anything of the sort in terms of sharing my work, and David created the safest, most supportive, and encouraging space to do so … David also provided the most thoughtful and detailed feedback on my pieces that I can apply to lots of other writing. I recommend David and his workshops most highly!”

  • Benjamin Cartwright, Poet and Winner of the Powder Horn Prize

    “I first shared new work with David over a decade ago, and in all the time since he has never let me down as a reader and advisor. He has a keen sense of what individual works need to take them further, and also how to put works together in a collection–culling what doesn’t belong, and arranging what does so the remaining writing is in lively conversation.”

Qualifications & Experience

I am the prize-winning author of three books of poetry, and have been published in anthologies and numerous magazines in the USA and Ireland. I am also a writer of memoir. I have contributed my writing to film and radio, spoken on podcasts and taught life writing, memoir, fiction, poetry and literature in a number of settings, including the workplace, universities, hospitals, libraries, and national and secondary schools. Organisations I have worked with include

  • New York University

  • The Irish Writers Centre

  • The Center for Fiction (USA)

  • Cork County Council (employee wellness pilot scheme)

  • University College, Dublin

  • Coler Specialty Hospital (New York) 

  • West Cork Literary Festival

  • The Shipman Agency (USA) 

I am on the panel of the National Mentoring Programme and was part of Ireland’s first pilot training programme in Social Prescribing for arts facilitators via Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre. I am also a member of a panel of facilitators who deliver workshops for Cork County Council Library and Arts Services, and I regularly consult and mentor individuals and groups in establishing creative writing as a tool to help them grow and find direction in their lives.  I hold a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from New York University, one of the premier creative writing faculties in the field, and an MLitt in Spanish literature from University College, Dublin. 

When it comes to soft skills, I am a deep and active listener, leaving space for students to allow their writing, and their selves, to emerge and play. I am also experienced in helping my students tease out the story they want to tell by discovering associative links and “bread crumbs” within their writing. I trained as a Reiki therapist many years ago, and have an enduring interest in Buddhist meditation and literature, as well as contemplative prayer, and the therapeutic benefits of writing.

Inquire About Classes in Expressive Writing for Your Team

Fill out this form and I’ll be in touch shortly.

Alternatively, email me directly at david[at]expressivewriting.eu