Speaking and Teaching Engagements

Catherine Kapphahn loves working with groups of people and is available to speak at events, book clubs, and take part in readings. For many years, she has led writing workshops that explore creativity and mindfulness. She has taught extensively on how writing about trauma can be a means of processing experience. 

Here are two workshops that Catherine often teaches:

“Cultivating Wonder: the Art of Noticing” is a workshop that allows students to define “Wonder” for themselves. In the course, they travel across a multitude of stories from wildly different perspectives, while exploring their creative selves as they venture out on urban adventures to historic places, performances, museums and botanical gardens. Within the class, students create community and art, as they stretch the meaning of intelligence for themselves. Students honor what has shaped them and how they learn. Students find new ways to become their own teachers who will cultivate wonder beyond the course. 

“Writing the Mind and Body: Translating the Physical Experience” carves out the space for students to write about their own personal history. In a dynamic workshop setting, students explore the language of movement and stillness, pain and healing, curiosity and wonder. They dive into their own stories with the support of a writing community, and they read stories that will sustain them throughout the writing process. Finally they examine how crafting a story is one powerful means of processing experience and finding resilience.