The mission of the Writing to Wholeness Collective is to improve individual and community well-being by promoting writing as a strategy for personal and social change. We formed in 2019 to spread the power of creative writing to those who have experienced domestic and sexual violence.

We are an intergenerational and interdisciplinary team of five artists, diverse in culture, expertise, and age. Our skills, our sensitivity (due to how trauma had impacted us personally), and our love of writing coalesced into an idea to share the writing exercises and mindfulness practices we witnessed as practical, successful tools to improve the well-being and wholeness of survivors. What we learned is that healing takes place within the collective, and so we gathered together a collective in order to pass along what we learned to the wider community.

The artists leading the Writing to Wholeness Collective are Elena Anderson Eggert and Wendy Brown-Baez. Both Wendy and Elena are authors with active writing careers.

  • Elena brings twelve years of advocacy experience serving victims of domestic and sexual violence in settings such as crisis lines, hospitals, and college campuses.
  • Wendy has facilitated writing workshops for thirty years in settings such as Cornerstone, The Aliveness Project, El Colegio High School, SafeZone, Face to Face Academy, and state prisons.

Additional artists in the Collective are Taja Will, Victoria Eidelsztein, and Dan Yang.

Stories are powerful connectors to each other and to our communities. This is a writing practice that takes into account our whole bodies, our whole selves, our whole lives, our whole communities.

We are not writing toward wholeness as if we are not already whole—we are; we may just need to reconnect to that truth. We are writing to wholeness, to honor the wholeness that is already within us.

All illustrations by https://www.holavicksz.com