How do we tell local stories that create global change?

Let's talk literature: Novelist R. Clifton Spargo and playwright Caity-Shea Violette in conversation at Yale University.

This summer, award-winning playwright Caity-Shea Violette, an alum of The Voices and Faces Project's testimonial writing program, and novelist R. Clifton Spargo the co-creator of that program and a lecturer in creative writing at Yale University, came together for a discussion focused on creativity, craft, and writing for page, stage, and screen.

For Caity-Shea, who took part in a 2012 Voices and Project writing workshop for survivors of gender-based violence, her time with us was transformative. "Writing about anything too close to my lived experience felt risky… but The Voices and Faces Project immersed me in a community of writers who believed my story as a point of entry, so I could get feedback about the actual storytelling devices without the pressure of proving that story was real." In the years since, Caity-Shea — who most recently won the Kennedy Center ACTF Harold & Mimi Steinberg Playwriting Award — has experienced great success.

As featured guest in Clifton's creative writing class for Yale Summer Session, Caity-Shea fielded questions from students about her plays, her craft for stage and screen, and various facets of her career. With regard to her visit and her gifts as a playwright, Clifton said afterward, "Caity-Shea is able to honor her activist's conscience and deeply feminist sensibility in drama that is simply great storytelling, drama which draws us close to flawed, aspiring, diverse characters, so that we feel their pain, their triumphs, their failings as so very like our own."

The Voices and Faces Project is bringing "The Stories We Tell," our testimonial writing workshop for survivors of gender-based violence, to Simmons Center for Global Chicago November 16 - 17. Apply today!

Developed to help those who have lived through or witnessed gender-based violence or other human rights violations use their voices, faces, and stories to call the public to greater compassion and — more importantly — social action, The Voices and Faces Project's testimonial writing program is supporting a new generation of activists seeking to use story to create social change. We're not just training writers. We're creating a global community.

During each immersive, two-day Voices and Faces Project writing workshop, a cohort of emerging and established artists, writers, activists, and survivors come together to read and discuss culture-changing literature from across history and various social justice movements…take part in a series of innovative, real-time writing exercises…and share creative work in moderated, expert-led workshop sessions. We cannot wait to meet our newest "Stories We Tell" cohort!