Royal Bank of Scotland Bring it 2020 has provided £500 of match funding
THE HEROINE SALON
Stranraer, Scotland, United Kingdom
Aim
Launching a community for personal story writing towards health, wellbeing, and life satisfaction. * Rewrite your story. Reset your life. *
Welcome to The Heroine Salon™
We are all storytellers here. We tell stories to ourselves and to others. We cast ourselves as characters in the novel we're writing every day. Sometimes, we are heroes and heroines. Other times, we are supporting characters. In one chapter, we are the boss; in the next, the victim. And then, we are the manipulative seductress, the cynical executive, the frustrated wife, the impulsive free spirit, the virtuous nurturer, the blocked creative, the brokenhearted lover.
Sometimes our narratives are light and bright. Other times they are dark and destructive.
In The Heroine Salon™, you can rewrite and reset your narrative so that you can live your best life.
What is The Heroine Salon™?
The Heroine Salon is a private, secure, and membership-based (online and in-person) community (and movement) where members discuss, write, rewrite, and share personal stories for enhanced mental health, wellbeing, and life satisfaction.
The Heroine Salon will launch a series of monthly in-person events (Glasgow, Belfast, London, Athens in the first instance) to enhance community building and provide opportunities for friendship and connection through story sharing.
Who is it for?
The Heroine Salon is for you if you:
- feel lost, disconnected, stuck, and just simply not your fabulous self, and
- love stories as a way to learn about life and people and how to overcome life's obstacles, and
- love the idea of writing stories for self-help, self-healing, self-optimisation, and self-understanding, but
- aren't sure how to develop a regular practice, and
- want to meet and connect as a member of a community and develop deep relationships, more compassion, and greater self-awareness through the power of telling and sharing stories
Why a salon?
Salons are places we go retreat and reset and tell and share stories.
For a start, there's literary salon (or the book or writing club). You walk in lost and lonely. You read and discuss books and stories, characters and conflicts. You share personal stories. You exit feeling clearer about things: determined to live well, just like the heroine in the novel you're reading.
Then, you also have your beauty salon. You walk in a mess. You get your hair and nails done, you have a massage. You chat. You share stories (and gossip) about loss, love, and life. You exit feeling fabulous: a heroine!
The Heroine Salon is both of the above and more.
The vibe is all about enhancing beauty inside and out. Both online and in-person events will have something special about them. We'll dress up a bit, show up to the blank page in our Sunday best. A bit of literary self-pampering as we get to the deep and personal act of writing our stories.
The vibe is definitely a personal flourishing vibe and it's through the power of writing and rewriting our personal stories and sharing and connecting with other stories together that makes this an extraordinary transformative experience.
What happens in the salon?
The Heroine Salon is a story-writing and story-sharing community with both an online and in-person event schedule. The Heroine Salon is hosted by author and educator Kathryn Koromilas.
Guided and self-paced activities.
In the Heroine Salon, you'll engage in guided writing activities (a variety of online and in-person options) and learn skills and techniques aimed at the following:
- Writing for improved mental health,resilience, and mindfulness
- Writing for personal identity, personal growth, personal clarity
- Writing for resetting your life path
- Writing for loss and for leaving a legacy (death writing)
- Writing for fun, self-care, self-pampering!
You will develop a personal storytelling practice that will transform the way you talk and think about yourself, your life choices, your possibility.
This is heroine writing.
Video tutorials, lessons, chats, inspirations.
Content is delivered in a variety of ways to suit all personalities and membership levels.
There are
- mini-courses and masterclasses (online and in-person options)
- info-sheets
- self-paced workbooks
- video chats and tutorials
- small group work
- as well as the option of 1:1 coaching.
By way of introduction to the style and voice of Heroine Salon writing coach Kathryn Koromilas, here's a brief video of her talking about how writing stories helped her clarify what she wanted at a very young age.
Shared memoir writing, shared experiences as exemplars, prompts, inspirations.
One of the strengths of the Heroine Salon approach is Kathryn's courage and vulnerability as a coach.
More a midwife, than an instructor, Kathryn assists you with the bringing forth, the "giving birth," of your personal story.
Kathryn shares both technical tips and personal stories as a way of encouraging, challenging, prompting, and motivating your own story.
Here are a few examples of how Kathryn's shared storytelling/memoir approach looks and feels like in its current form on the Facebook platform. Kathryn also encourages stories to be told live on the platform or recorded. For some examples, click here for soundbites.
About Kathryn Koromilas
Why me?
I am a writer and educator with a Master of Philosophy degree in Creative Writing.
I write and read stories to understand the world and my place in it.
I wrote my first novel Palimpsest because I wanted to understand what turned people into fanatics; I wrote THIS IS NOT A LOVE STORY because I wanted to understand a few things about love. I wrote a lot about Greece because I wanted to learn about the country I lived in for a decade.
I am a skilled and experienced writing instructor with over twenty years of experience in teaching creative writing, academic writing, language and literacy up to the university level.
I employ a variety of teaching methodologies and information technology tools, in both physical and virtual classrooms, to fulfil the needs and learning styles of a broad spectrum of learners.
I design and deliver learning experiences to meet the needs of disparate learners.
I create simple yet extraordinary learning experiences, driven by my passion for the written word and the world of stories.
My focus is now purely on personal writing for self-help and self-transformation.
I was recently mentioned in The Times after having attended the Modern Stoicism conference to talk about using philosophical writing techniques to write for personal transformation.
My work on writing for personal transformation and flourishing is built on the work of ancient philosophers who pioneered the practice of writing as a way of resetting our thoughts and judgements about bad things, such as grief, loss, and annoying people. Everyone from emperors to slaves used structured and mindful writing practices to rewrite the narratives that were making them unhappy.
Finally, I'd just like to add that, over the years, I've worked with, teach for, written for, or had the occasional article or voluntary assignment for some amazing organizations, such as the below.
Why is The Heroine Salon™ crowdfunding?
- To launch as an online membership community in a secure, focused, and distraction-free platform. Initial funding will be injected into platform subscription and set-up costs. Currently considering the Podia platform.
- To launch monthly in-person Heroine Salon events in Glasgow, Belfast, London, and Athens in 2020.
- To support the production of Heroine Salon resources: Heroine Cast (podcast), video content, theme-modules, mini-courses, 5-minute-options, weekly challenges, longer courses, and digital and hardcopy workbooks.
- To integrate the storytelling, journaling, and writing work I do (across Facebook) into a single community so that I can better focus my resources and time and serve our community and our members in a safe and supportive environment.
Postscript
The Heroine Salon is all-inclusive and I invite everyone who identifies with this idea and this need to rewrite the stories we tell ourselves to please join in, share, and write. Let's be our own Heroines.
This project successfully funded on 5th April 2020